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Author's Edition. 



THE 



CONDUCT OF LIFE. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 

AUTHOR OF " REPRESENTATIVE MEN," "TRAITS OF ENGLISH LIFE/' 
ETC. ETC. 



,$ECONI) FT) XT JON. 



LONDON: 

SMITH, ELDEE AND CO., 65, COENHILL. 

M.DCCC.LX. 



,o 



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4^"? 



CONTENTS, 



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PAGE 

I. Fate . . 1 

II. Power 32 

HE. Wealth . . . . .51 

IV. Culture . . . . . 80 

V. Behaviour . • . . .104 

VI. Worship . : . . . . 123 

VII. Considerations by the Way , .151 

VIIT. Beauty , . . ... 174 

IX. Illusions . . . .191 



CONDUCT OF LIFE. 



I -FATE. 

Delicate omens traced in air 
To the lone bard true witness bare; 
Birds with auguries on their wings 
Chanted undeceiving things 
Him to beckon, him to warn; 
Well might then the poet scorn 
To learn of scribe or courier 
Hints writ in vaster character; 
And on his mind, at dawn of day, 
Soft shadows of the evening lay. 
For the prevision is allied 
Unto the thing so signified; 
Or say, the foresight that awaits 
Is the same Genius that creates. 

It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that 
our cities were bent on discussing the theory of the 
Age. By an odd coincidence, four or five noted men 
were each reading a discourse . to the citizens of 
Boston or New York, on the Spirit of the Times. 
It so happened that the subject had the same pro-* 
minence in some remarkable pamphlets and journals 
issued in London in the same season. To me, how- 
ever, the question ; of the times resolved itself into a 
practical question of the conduct of life. How shall 
I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our 
geometry cannot - span the huge orbits of the pre- 
vailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their 
opposition. We can only obey our own polarity 
'Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if 
we must accept an irresistible dictation. 

1 



2 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come 
upon immovable limitations. We are fired with the 
hope to reform men. After many experiments, we 
find that we must begin earlier, — at school. But 
the boys and girls are not docile ; we can make 
nothing of them. We decide that they are not of 
good stock. We must begin our reform earlier 
still, — at generation : that is to say, there is Fate, or 
laws of the world. 

But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation 
understands itself. If we must accept Fate, we are 
not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance 
of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of 
character. This is true, and that other is true. But 
our geometry cannot span these extreme points and 
reconcile them. What to do? By obeying each 
thought frankly, by harping, or, if you will, pounding 
on each string, we learn at last its power. By the 
same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs, 
and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing 
them. We are sure, that, though we know not how, 
necessity does comport with liberty, the individual 
with the world, my polarity with the spirit of the 
times. The riddle of the age has for each a private 
solution. If one would study his own time, it must 
be by this method of taking up in turn each of the 
leading topics which belong to our scheme of human 
life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to 
experience on one, and doing the same justice to the 
opposing facts in the others, the true limitations will 
appear. Any excess of emphasis, on one part, would 
be corrected, and a just balance would be made. 

But let us honestly state the facts. Our America 
has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, 
great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, 
but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned 
themselves to face it. The Spartan, embodying his 
religion in his country, dies before its majesty without 



FATE. 3 

a question. The Turk, who believes his doom is 
written on the iron leaf in the moment when he 
entered the world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with 
undivided will. The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, 
accept the foreordained fate. 

" On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave— 
The appointed, and the unappointed day; 
On the first, neither balm nor physician can save, 
Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay." 

The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm. Our 
Calvinists, in the last generation, had something of 
the same dignity. They felt that the weight of the 
universe held them down to their place. What could 
they do? Wise men feel that there is something 
which cannot be talked or voted away, — a strap or 
belt which girds the world. 

" The Destiny, minister general, 
That executeth in the world o'er all, 
The purveyance which God hath seen beforne, 
So strong it is, that tho' the world had sworn 
The contrary of a thing by yea or nay, 
Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day 
That falleth not oft in a thousand year; 
For, certainly, our appetites here, 
Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love, 
All this is ruled by the sight above." 

Chaucer: The Knighte's Tale. 

The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense : 
" Whatever is fated, that will take place. The 
great immense mind of Jove is not to be trans- 
gressed." 

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. 
The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to 
village theologies, which preach an election or fa- 
vouritism. And, now and then, an amiable parson, 
like Jung Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in 
a pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good 
man wants a dinner, makes that somebody shall 
knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar. But 
Nature is no sentimentalist,-— does not cosset or 

1—2 



4 CONDUCT OF LITE. 

pamper us. We must see that the world is rough 
and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a 
woman ; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust. 
The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, 
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The 
diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, 
respect no persons. The way of Providence is a 
little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the snap 
of the tiger, and other leapers and bloody jumpers, 
the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the 
anaconda, — these are in the system, and our habits 
are like theirs. You have just dined, and, however 
scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the 
graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, — 
expensive races, — race living at the expense of race. 
The planet is liable to shocks from comets, perturba- 
tions from planets, rendings from earthquake and 
volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equi- 
noxes. Rivers dry up by opening of the forest. The 
sea changes its bed. Towns and counties fall into it. 
At Lisbon, an earthquake killed men like flies. At 
Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were 
crushed in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea ; the 
sword of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, 
at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a 
massacre. Our western prairie shakes with fever and 
ague. The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as 
mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, 
having filled the summer with noise, are silenced by 
a fall of the temperature of one night. Without 
uncovering what does not concern us, or counting 
how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx ; or 
groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, 
or the obscurities of alternate generation ; — the forms 
of the shark, the labnis, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved 
with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus, and 
other warriors hidden in the sea, — are hints of 
ferocity in the interiors of nature. Let us not deny 



FATE. 5 

it up and down. Providence has a wild, rough, 
incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to try- 
to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to 
dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and 
white neckcloth of a student in divinity. 

Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind 
are exceptional, and one need not lay his account for 
cataclysms every day ? Ay, but what happens once 
may happen again, and so long as these strokes are 
not to be parried by us, they must be feared. 

But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to 
us, than the stealthy power of other laws which act 
on us daily. An expense of ends to means is fate ; — 
organization tyrannizing over character. The me- 
nagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book 
of fate : the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, 
determines tyrannically its limits. So is the scale of 
races, of temperaments ; so is sex ; so is climate ; so 
is the reaction of talents imprisoning the vital power 
in certain directions. Every spirit makes its house ; 
but afterwards the house confines the spirit. 

The gross lines are legible to the dull : the cabman 
is phrenologist so far : he looks in your face to see if 
his shilling is sure. A dome of brow denotes one 
thing ; a pot-belly another ; a squint, a pug-nose, 
mats of hah*, the pigment of the epidermis, betray 
character. People seem sheathed in their tough 
organization. Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask 
Quetelet, if temperaments decide nothing ? or if there 
be anything they do not decide ? Read the descrip- 
tion in medical books of the four temperaments, and 
you will think you are reading your own thoughts ' 
which you had not yet told. Find the part which 
black eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally in 
the company. How shall a man escape from his 
ancestors, or draw off from his veins the black drop 
which he drew from his father's or his mother's life ? 
It often appears in a family, as if all the qualities of 



6 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

the progenitors were potted in several jars, — some 
ruling quality in each, son or daughter of the house, — 
and sometimes the unmixed temperament, the rank 
unmitigated elixir, the family vice, is drawn off in a 
separate individual, and the others are proportionally 
relieved. We sometimes see a change of expression 
in our companion, and say, his father, or his mother, 
comes to the windows of his eyes, and sometimes a 
remote relative. In different hours, a man represents 
each of several of his ancestors, as if there were 
seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin, 
—seven or eight ancestors at least, — and they con- 
stitute the variety of notes for that new piece of 
music which his life is. At the corner of the street, 
you read the possibility of each passenger, in the 
facial angle, in the complexion, in the depth of his eye. 
His parentage determines it. Men are what their 
mothers made them. You may as well ask a loom 
which weaves huckaback, why it does not make 
cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a 
chemical discovery from that jobber. Ask the digger 
in the ditch to explain Newton's laws : the fine organs 
of his brain have been pinched by overwork and 
squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred 
years. When each comes forth from his mother's 
womb, the gate of gifts closes behind him. Let him 
value his hands and feet, he has but one pair. So 
he has but one future, and that is already prede- 
termined in his lobes, and described in that little fatty 
face, pig-eye, and squat form. All the privilege and 
all the legislation of the world cannot meddle or help 
to make a poet or a prince of him. 

Jesus said, " When he looketh on her he hath 
committed adultery." But he is an adulterer before 
he has yet looked on the woman, by the superfluity 
of animal, and the defect of thought, in his constitu- 
tion. Who meets him, or who meets her, in the street, 
sees that they are ripe to be each other's victim. 



FATE. 7 

In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital 
force, and the stronger these are, the individual is so 
much weaker. The more of these drones perish, the 
better for the hive. If, later, they give birth to some 
superior individual, with force enough to add to this 
animal a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work 
it out, all the ancestors are gladly forgotten. Most 
men and most women are merely one couple more. 
Now and then, one has a new cell or camarilla opened 
in his brain, — an architectural, a musical, or a philo- 
logical knack, some stray taste or talent for flowers, 
or chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good 
hand for drawing, a good foot for dancing, an athletic 
frame for wide journeying, &c. — which skill nowise 
alters rank in the scale of nature, but serves to pass 
the time, the life of sensation going on as before. At 
last, these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or 
in a succession. Each absorbs so much food and 
force, as to become itself a new centre. The new 
talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that not 
enough remains for the animal functions, hardly 
enough for health ; so that,* in the second generation, 
if the like genius appear, the health is visibly de- 
teriorated, and the generative force impaired. 

People are born with the moral or with the material 
bias ; — uterine brothers with this diverging destina- 
tion: and I suppose, with high magnifiers, Mr. Frauen- • 
hofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to distinguish in 
the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and 
that a Free-soiler. 

It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of 
Fate, to reconcile this despotism of race with liberty, 
which led the Hindoos to say, " Fate is nothing but 
the deeds committed in a prior state of existence." 
I find the coincidence of the extremes of eastern 
and western speculation in the daring statement of 
Schelling : " There is in every man a certain feeling, 
that he has been what he is from all eternity, and 



8 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

by no means became such in time." To say it less 
sublimely, — in the history of the individual is always 
an account of his condition, and he knows himself to 
be a party to his present estate. 

A good deal of our politics is physiological. Now 
and then, a man of wealth in the heyday of youth 
adopts the tenet of broadest freedom. In England, 
there is always some man of wealth and large con- 
nection planting himself, during all his years of 
health, on the side of progress, who, as soon as he 
begins to die, checks his forward play, calls in his 
troops, and becomes conservative. All conservatives 
are such from personal defects. They have been 
effeminated by position or nature, born halt and 
blind, through luxury of their parents, and can 
only, like invalids, act on the defensive. But strong 
natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants, 
Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, 
are inevitable patriots, until their life ebbs, and their 
defects and gout, palsy and money, warp them. 

The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities 
and nations, in the healthiest and strongest. Probably, 
the election goes by avoirdupois weight, and, if you 
could weigh bodily the tonnage of any hundred of 
the Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on 
the Dearborn balance, as they passed the hayscales, 
you could predict with certainty which party would 
•carry -it. On the whole, it would be rather the 
speediest way of deciding the vote, to put the select- 
men or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales. 

'In science, we have to consider two things : power 
and circumstance. All we know of the egg, from. 
each successive discovery, is, another vesicle ; and if, 
after five hundred years, you get a better observer, 
or a better glass, he finds within the last observed 
another. In vegetable and animal tissue, it is just 
alike, and all that the primary power or spasm 
operates, is, still, vesicles, vesicles. Yes, — but the 



TATE. 9 

tyrannical Circumstance ! A vesicle in new circum- 
stances, a vesicle lodged in darkness, Oken thought, 
became animal ; in light, a plant. Lodged in the 
parent animal, it suffers changes, which end in un- 
sheathing miraculous capability in the unaltered 
vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish, bird, or quad- 
ruped, head and foot, eye and claw. The Circum- 
stance is Nature. Nature is, what you may do. There 
is much you may not. We have two things, — the 
circumstance, and the life. Once we thought, positive 
power was all. Now we learn, that negative power, 
or circumstance, is half. Nature is the tyrannous 
circumstance, the thick skull, the sheathed snake, 
the ponderous, rock-like jaw; necessitated activity; 
violent direction ; the conditions of a tool, like the 
locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can 
do nothing but mischief off of it ; or skates, which 
are wings on the ice, but fetters on the ground. 

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She 
turns the gigantic pages, — leaf after leaf, — never 
returning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of 
granite ; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate ; a 
thousand ages, and a measure of coal ; a thousand 
ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms 
appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, tri- 
lobium, fish; then saurians, — rude forms, in which 
she has only blocked her future statue, concealing 
under these unwieldy monsters the fine type of 
her coming king. The face of the planet cools 
and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. 
But when a race has lived its term, it comes no 
more again. 

The population of the world is a conditional popu- 
lation; not the best, but the best that could live now; 
and the scale of tribes, and the steadiness with which 
victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to another, is 
as uniform as the superposition of strata. We know 
in history what weight belongs to race. We see the 



10 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

English, French, and Germans planting themselves 
on every shore and market of America and Australia, 
and monopolizing the commerce of these countries. 
We like the nervous and victorious habit of our own 
branch of the family. We follow the step of the 
Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro. We see how 
much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, 
in vain. Look at the unpalatable conclusions of 
Knox, in his Fragment of Races, — a rash and un- 
satisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and 
unforgetable truths. "Nature respects race and not 
hybrids." " Every race has its own habitat." " De- 
tach a colony from the race, and it deteriorates to 
the crab." See the shades of the picture. The 
German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a 
great deal of guano in their destiny. They are 
ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, 
to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and 
then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green 
grass on the prairie. 

One more fagot of these adamantine bandages is, 
the new science of statistics. It is a rule, that the 
most casual and extraordinary events — if the basis of 
population is broad enough — become matter of fixed 
calculation. It would not be safe to say when a 
captain like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or 
a navigator like Bowditch, would be born in Boston : 
but, on a population of twenty or two hundred mil- 
lions, something like accuracy may be had.* 

'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of par- 
ticular inventions. They have all been invented over 
and over fifty times. Man is the arch-machine, of 
which all these shifts drawn from himself are toy 

* "Everything which pertains to the human species, considered 
as a whole, belongs to the order of physical facts. The greater 
the number of individuals, the more does the influence of the 
individual will disappear, leaving predominance to a series of 
general facts dependent on causes by which society exists, and is 
preserved." — Quetelet. 



EATE. 11 

models. He helps himself on each emergency by 
copying or duplicating his own structure, just so far 
as the need is. 'Tis hard to find the right Homer, 
Zoroaster, or Menu ; harder still to find the Tubal 
Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or Copernicus, or Fust, 
or Fulton, the indisputable inventor. There are 
scores and centuries of them. " The air is full of 
men." This kind of talent so abounds, this construc- 
tive tool-making efficiency, as if it adhered to the 
chemic atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of 
Vaucansons, Franklins, and Watts. ' 

Doubtless, in every million there will be an astro- 
nomer, a mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic. No 
one can read the history of astronomy, without per- 
ceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not 
new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, 
Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, 
Pythagoras, (Enipodes, had anticipated them; each 
had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for the 
same vigorous computation and logic, a mind parallel 
to the movement of the world. The Roman mile 
probably rested on a measure of a degree of the 
meridian. Mahometan and Chinese know what we 
know of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and 
of the precession of the equinoxes. As, in every 
barrel of cowries, brought to New Bedford, there 
shall be one orangia, so there will, in a dozen millions 
of Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astrono- 
mical skulls. In a large city, the most casual things, 
and things whose beauty lies in their casualty, are 
produced as punctually and to order as the baker's 
muffin for breakfast. Punch makes exactly one 
capital joke a week ; and the journals contrive to 
furnish one good piece of news- every day. 

And not less work the laws of repression, the 
penalties of violated, functions. Famine, typhus, 
frost, war, suicide, and effete races, must be reck- 
oned calculable parts of the system of the world. 



12 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

These are pebbles from the mountain, hints ot the 
terms by which our life is walled up, and which 
show a kind of mechanical exactness, as of a loom or 
mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous events. 

The force with which we resist these torrents of 
tendency looks so ridiculously inadequate, that it 
amounts to little more than a criticism or a protest 
made by a minority of one, under compulsion of 
millions. I seemed, in the height of a tempest, to 
see men overboard struggling in the waves, and 
driven about here and there. They glanced intel- 
ligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do 
for one another; 'twas much if each could keep 
afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye- 
beams, and all the rest was Fate. 

We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping- 
out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. 
No picture of life can have any veracity that does 
not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped 
in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he 
touches on every side, until he learns its arc. 

The element running through entire nature, which 
we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. 
Whatever limits us we call Fate. If w T e are brute 
and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful 
shape. As we refine, our checks become finer. If 
we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a 
spiritual form. In the Hindoo fables, Vishnu fol- 
lows Maya through all her ascending changes, from 
insect and crawfish up to elephant ; whatever form 
she took, he took the male form of that kind, until 
she became at last woman and goddess, and he a 
man and a god. The limitations refine as the soul 
purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched 
at the top. 

When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable 
to bind the Fenris Wolf with steel or with weight of 



FATE. 13 

mountains — the one lie snapped and the other he 
spurned with his heel — they put round his foot a 
limp band softer than silk or cobweb, and this held 
him: the more he spurned it, the stiffer it drew. 
So soft and so stanch is the ring of Fate. Neither 
brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, 
nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this 
limp band. For if we give it the high sense in 
which the poets use it, even thought itself is not 
above Fate : that too must act according to eternal 
laws, and all that is wilful and fantastic in it is in 
opposition to its fundamental essence. 

And, last of all, high over thought, in the world 
of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the 
high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and 
always striking soon or late, when justice is not done. 
What is useful will last ; what is hurtful will sink. 
" The doer must suffer," said the Greeks : (e you 
would soothe a Deity not to be soothed." " God 
himself cannot procure good for the wicked," said 
the Welsh triad. " God may consent, but only for 
a time," said the bard of Spain. The limitation is 
impassable by any insight of man. In its last and 
loftiest ascensions, insight itself, and the freedom of 
the will, is one of its obedient members. But we 
must not run into generalizations too large, but show 
the natural bounds or essential distinctions, and seek 
to do justice to the other elements as well. 

Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals — 
in race, in retardations of strata, and in thought and 
character as well. It is everywhere bound or limi- 
tation. But Fate has its lord ; limitation its limits ; 
is different seen from above and from below ; from 
within and from without. For, though Fate is im- 
mense, so is power, which is the other fact in the 
dual world, immense. If Fate follows and limits 
power, power attends and antagonizes Fate. We 



14 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

must respect Fate as natural history, but there is 
more than natural history. For who and what is 
this criticism that pries into the matter ? Man is 
not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and mem- 
bers, link in a chain, nor any ignominious baggage, 
but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of 
the poles of the Universe. He betrays his relation 
to what is below him — thick-skulled, small-brained, 
fishy, quadrurnanous — quadruped ill-disguised, hardly 
escaped into biped, and has paid for the new powers 
by loss of some of the old ones. But the lightning 
which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets 
and suns, is in him. On one side, elemental order, 
sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, 
sea and shore ; and, on the other part, thought, the 
spirit which composes and decomposes nature — here 
they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and 
matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding 
peacefully together in the eye and brain of every 
man. 

Nor can he blink the free will. To hazard the 
contradiction, freedom is necessary. If you please 
to plant yourself on the side of Fate, and say Fate is 
all, then we say a part of Fate is the freedom of man. 
For ever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting 
in the soul. Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man 
thinks he is free. And though nothing is more dis- 
gusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as 
most men are, and the flippant mistaking for free- 
dom of some paper preamble like a " .Declaration of 
Independence," or the statute right to vote, by those 
who have never dared to think or to act, yet it is 
wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the other 
way; the practical view is the other. His sound 
relation to these facts is to use and command, not to 
cringe to them. " Look not on nature, for her name 
is fatal," said the oracle. The too much contem- 
plation of these limits induces meanness. They who 



FATE. 15 

talk much of destiny, their birth -star, &c, are in 
a lower dangerous plane, and invite the evils they 
fear. 

I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud 
believers in destiny. They conspire with it ; a loving 
resignation is with the event. But the dogma makes 
a different impression, when it is held by the weak 
and lazy. 'Tis weak and vicious people who cast 
the blame on Fate. The right use of Fate is to 
bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature. 
Rude and invincible except by themselves are the 
elements. So let man be. Let him empty his 
breast of his windy conceits, and show his lordship 
by manners and deeds on the scale of nature. Let 
• him hold his purpose as with the tug of gravitation. 
No power, no persuasion, no bribe shall make him 
give up his point. A man ought to compare advan- 
tageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He 
shall have not less the flow, the expansion, and the 
resistance of these. 

'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage. 
Go face the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's 
house, or the burglar in your own, or what danger 
lies in the way of duty, knowing you are guarded 
by the cherubim of Destiny. If you believe in 
Fate to your harm, believe it, at least, for your 
good. 

For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part 
of it, and can confront fate with fate. If the 
Universe have these savage accidents, our atoms are 
as savage in resistance. We should be crushed 
by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air 
within the body. A tube made of a film of glass 
can resist the shock of the ocean, if filled with the 
same water. If there be omnipotence in the stroke, 
there is omnipotence of recoil. 

I. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and 
defence : there are, also, the noble creative forces. 



16 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

The revelation of Thought takes man out of servi- 
tude into freedom. We rightly say of ourselves, 
we were born, and afterward we were born again, 
and mairy times. We have successive experiences 
so important, that the new forgets the old, and 
hence the mythology of the seven or the nine 
heavens. The day of days, the great day of the 
feast of life, is that in which the inward eye opens 
to the Unity in things, to the omnipresence of law ; 
— sees that what is must be, and ought to be, or is 
the best. This beatitude dips from on high down 
on us, and we see. It is not in us so much as 
we are in it. If the air come to our lungs, we 
breathe and live ; if not, we die. If the light. 
come to our eyes, we see ; else not. And if truth 
come to our mind, we suddenly expand to its 
dimensions, as if we grew to worlds. We are as 
lawgivers ; we speak for Nature ; we prophesy and 
divine. 

This insight throws us on the party and interest 
of the Universe, against all and sundry ; against 
ourselves, as much as others. A man speaking 
from insight affirms of himself what is true of the 
mind : seeing its immortality, he says, I am im- 
mortal ; seeing its invincibility, he says, I am strong. 
It is not in us, but we are in it. It is of the 
maker, not of what is made. All things are touched 
and changed by it. This uses, and is not used. It 
distances those who share it, from those who share 
it not. Those who share it not are flocks and herds. 
It dates from itself; — not from former men or better 
men, — gospel, or constitution, or college, or custom. 
Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but 
all things make a musical or pictorial impression. 
The world of men show like a comedy without 
laughter: — populations, interests, government, his- 
tory; — 'tis all toy figures in a toy house. It does 
not overvalue particular truths. We hear eagerly 



EATE. 17 

every thought and word quoted from an intellectual 
man. But, in his presence, our own mind is roused 
to activity, and we forget very fast what he says, 
much more interested in the new play of our own 
thought, than in any thought of his. 'Tis the 
majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the 
impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of 
laws, that engage us. Once we were stepping a 
little this way, and a little that way ; now we are as 
men in a balloon, and do not think so much of the 
point we have left, or the point we would make, as 
of the liberty and glory of the way 

Just as much intellect as you add, so much 
organic power. He who sees through the design, 
presides over it, and must will that which must be. 
We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream 
will come to pass. Our thought, though it were 
only an hour old, affirms an oldest necessity, not to 
be separated from thought, and not to be separated 
from will. They must always have coexisted. It 
apprises us of its sovereignty and godhead, which 
refuse to be severed from it. It is not mine or thine, 
but the will of all mind. It is poured into the souls 
of all men, as the soul itself which constitutes them 
men. I know not whether there be, as is alleged, 
in the upper region of our atmosphere, a permanent 
westerly current, which carries with it all atoms 
which rise to that height; but I see, that when 
souls reach a certain clearness of perception, they 
accept a knowledge and motive above selfishness. 
A breath of will blows eternally through the uni- 
verse of souls in the direction of the Right and 
Necessary. It is the air which all intellects inhale 
and exhale, and it is the wind which blows the 
worlds into order and orbit. 

Thought dissolves the material universe, hy car- 
rying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic. 
Of two men, each obeying his own thought, he 

2 



18 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

whose thought is deepest will be the strongest 
character. Always one man more than another 
represents the will of Divine Providence to the 
period. 

2. If thought makes free, so does the moral sen- 
timent. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse 
to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the per- 
ception of truth is joined the desire that it shall 
prevail. That affection is essential to will. More- 
over, when a strong will appears, it usually results 
from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole 
energy of body and mind flowed in one direction. 
All great force is real and elemental. There is no 
manufacturing a strong will. There must be a 
pound to balance a pound. Where power is shown 
in will, it must rest on the universal force. Alaric 
and Bonaparte must believe they rest on a truth, or 
their will can be bought or bent. There is a bribe 
possible for any finite will. But the pure sympathy 
with universal ends is an infinite force, and cannot 
be bribed or bent. Whoever has had experience 
of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in 
unlimited power. Each pulse from that heart is an 
oath from the Most High. I know not what the 
word sublime means, if it be not the intimations in 
this infant of a terrific force. A text of heroism, a 
name and anecdote of courage, are not arguments, 
but sallies of freedom. One of these is the verse 
of the Persian Hafiz : " 'Tis written on the gate of 
Heaven, l Wo unto him who suffers himself to be 
betrayed by Fate ! ' " Does the reading of history 
make us fatalists? What courage does not the 
opposite opinion show ! A little whim of will to be 
free gallantfv contending against the universe of 
chemistry. 

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Per- 
ception is cold, and goodness dies in wishes; as 
Voltaire said, 'tis the misfortune of worthy people 



FATE. 19 

that they are cowards : " un des plus grands malheurs 
des honnetes gens c' est quHls sont des laches." There 
must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy 
of will. There can be no driving force, except 
through the conversion of the man into his will, 
making him the will, and the will him. And one 
may say boldly, that no man has a right perception 
of any truth, who has not been reacted on by it, so as 
to be ready to be its martyr. 

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is 
a will. Society is servile from want of will, and 
therefore the world wants saviours and religions, 
One way is right to go : the hero sees it, and moves 
on that aim, and has the world under him for root 
and support. He is to others as the world. His 
approbation is honour; his dissent, infamy. The 
glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A 
personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, 
and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravi- 
tation, and the rest of Fate. 

We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know 
it is the meter of the growing man. We stand 
against Fate, as children stand up against the wall 
in their father's house, and notch their height from 
year to year. But when the boy grows to man, and 
is master of the house, he pulls down that wall, and 
builds a new and bigger. 'Tis only a question of 
time. Every brave youth is in training to ride and 
rule this dragon. His science is to make weapons 
and wings of these passions and retarding forces. 
Now whether, seeing these two things, fate and power, 
we are permitted to believe in unity ? The bulk of 
mankind believe in two gods. They are under one 
dominion here in the house, as friend and parent, 
in social circles, in letters, in art, in love, in religion : 
but in mechanics, in dealing with steam and climate, 
in trade, in politics, they think they come under 
another ; and that it would be a practical blunder to 

2—2 



20 CONDUCT OF LITE. 

transfer the method and way of working of one sphere, 
into the other. What good, honest, generous men at 
home, will be wolves and foxes on 'change ! What 
pious men in the parlour will vote for what repro- 
bates at the polls ! To a certain point, they believe 
themselves the care of a Providence. But in a 
steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they believe a 
malignant energy rules. 

But relation and connection are not somewhere 
and sometimes, but everywhere and always. The 
divine order does not stop where their sight stops. 
The friendly power works on the same rules, in the 
next farm, and the next planet. But, where they 
have not experience, they run against it, and hurt 
themselves. Fate, then, is a name for facts not yet 
passed under the fire of thought ; for causes which 
are unpenetrated. 

But every jet of chaos which threatens to exter- 
minate us, is convertible by intellect into wholesome 
force. Fate is unpenetrated causes. The water 
drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust. But 
learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which 
drowned it, will be cloven by it, and carry it, like its 
own foam, a plume and a power. The cold is incon- 
siderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man 
like a dew-drop. But learn to skate, and the ice will 
give you a graceful, sweet, and poetic motion. The 
cold will brace your limbs and brain to genius, and 
make you foremost men of time. Cold and sea will 
train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot 
bear to lose, and, after cooping it up for a thou- 
sand years in yonder England, gives a hundred 
Englands, a hundred Mexicos. All the bloods it 
shall absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos, 
— the secrets of water and steam, the spasms of 
electricity, the ductility of metals, the chariot 
of the air, the ruddered balloon are awaiting 
you, 



FATE. 21 

The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that 
of war; but right drainage destroys typhus. The 
plague in the sea-service from scurvy is healed by 
lemon-juice and other diets portable or procurable ; 
the depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended 
by drainage and vaccination ; and every other pest is 
not less in the chain of cause and effect, and may be 
fought off. And, whilst art draws out the venom, it 
commonly extorts some benefit from the vanquished 
enemy. The mischievous torrent is taught to drudge 
for man; the wild beasts lie makes useful for food, or 
dress, or labour; the ehemie explosions are controlled 
like his watch. These are now the steeds on which 
he rides. Man moves in all modes, by legs of horses, 
by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by 
electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt 
the eagle in his own element. There's nothing he 
will not make his carrier. 

Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we 
dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or 
brazier had a hole in its cover, to let off the enemy, 
lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry the house 
away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and 
Fulton bethought themselves, that, where was power, 
was not devil, but was God ; that it must be availed 
of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could 
he lift pots and roofs and. houses so handily ? he was 
the workman they were in search of. He could be 
used to lift away, chain, and compel other devils, 
far more reluctant and dangerous, namely 5 cubic 
miles of earth, mountains, weight or resistance of 
water, machinery, and the labours of all men in 
the world ; and time he shall lengthen, and shorten 
space. 

It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds 
of steam. The opinion of the million was the terror 
of the world, and it was attempted, either to dis- 
sipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it over with 



22 CONDUCT OF LEFE. 

strata of society, — a layer of soldiers ; over that, a 
layer of lords ; and a king on the top ; with clamps 
and hoops of castles, garrisons, and police. But, 
sometimes, the religious principle would get in, and 
burst the hoops, and rive every mountain laid on top 
of it. The Fultons and Watts of politics, believing 
in unity, saw that it was a power, and, by satisfying 
it (as justice satisfies everybody), through a different 
disposition of society, — grouping it on a level, instead 
of piling it into a mountain, — they have contrived to 
make of this terror the most harmless and energetic 
form of a State. 

Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. 
Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronounc- 
ing on his fortunes ? Who likes to believe that he 
has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the 
vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure 
to pull him down, — with what grandeur of hope 
and resolve he is fired, — into a selfish, huckstering, 
servile, dodging animal ? A learned physician tells 
us, the fact is invariable with the Neapolitan, that, 
when mature, he assumes the forms of the unmis- 
takeable scoundrel. That is a little overstated, — but 
may pass. 

But these are magazines and arsenals. A man 
must thank his defects, and stand in some terror 
of his talents. A transcendent talent draws so 
largely on his forces, as to lame him ; a defect pays 
him revenues on the other side. The sufferance, 
which is the badge of the Jew, has made him, in 
these days, the ruler of the rulers of the earth. If 
Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making, 
if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, 
oppositions, and weights are wings and means, — we 
are reconciled. 

Fate involves the melioration. No statement of 
the Universe can have any soundness, which does 
not admit its ascending effort. The direction of the 



FATE. 23 

whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and in 
proportion to the health. Behind every individual, 
closes organization : before him, opens liberty, — the 
Better, the Best. The first and worst races are 
dead. The second and imperfect races are dying 
out, or remain for the maturing of higher. In the 
latest race, in man, every generosity, every new 
perception, the love and praise he extorts from his 
fellows, are certificates of advance out of fate into 
freedom. Liberation of the will from the sheaths 
and clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is 
the end and aim of this world. Every calamity is a 
spur and valuable hint; and where his endeavours 
do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency. The 
whole circle of animal life, — tooth against tooth, — 
devouring war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a 
grunt of triumph, until, at last, the whole menagerie, 
the whole chemical mass is mellowed and refined for 
higher use, — pleases at a sufficient perspective. 

But to see how Fate slides into freedom, and free- 
dom into Fate, observe how far the roots of every 
creature run, or find 3 if you can, a point where there 
is no thread of connection. Our life is consentaneous 
and far-related. This knot of nature is so well tied, 
that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two 
ends. Nature is intricate, overlapped, interweaved, 
and endless. Christopher Wren said of the beautiful 
King's College chapel, " that, if anybody would tell 
him where to lay the first stone, he would build such 
another." But where shall we find the first atom in 
this house of man, which is all consent, inosculation, 
and balance of parts ? 

The web of relation is shown in habitat, shown in 
hybernation. When hybernation was observed, it 
was found, that, whilst some animals became torpid 
in winter, others were torpid in summer : hyberna- 
tion then was a false name. The long sleep is not an 
effect of cold, but is regulated by the supply of 



24 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

food proper to the animal. It becomes torpid when 
the fruit or prey it lives on is not in season, and 
regains its activity when its food is ready. 

Eyes are found in light; ears in auricular air; 
feet on land ; fins in watei\; wings in air ; and each 
creature where it was meant to be, with a mutual 
fitness. Every zone has its own Fauna. There is 
adjustment between the animal and its food, its para- 
site, its enemy. Balances are kept. It is not allowed 
to diminish in numbers, nor to exceed. The like 
adjustments exist for man. His food is cooked, 
when he arrives ; his coal in the pit ; the house 
ventilated; the mud of the deluge dried; his com- 
panions arrived at the same hour, and awaiting him 
with love, concert, laughter, and tears. These are 
coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not less. 
There are more belongings to every creature than 
his air and his food. His instincts must be met, and 
he has predisposing power that bends and fits what is 
near him to his use. He is not possible until the 
invisible things are right for him, as well as the 
visible. Of what changes, then, in sky and earth, 
and in finer skies and earths, does the appearance of 
some Dante or Columbus apprise us ! 

How is this effected? Nature is no spendthrift, 
but takes the shortest way to her ends. As the 
general says to his soldiers, " If you want a fort, build 
a fort," so nature makes every creature do its own 
work and get its living. Is it planet, animal, or tree? 
— The planet makes itself: the animal cell makes 
itself; — then, what it wants. Every creature, — 
wren or dragon, — shall make its own lair. As soon 
as there is life, there is self-direction, and absorbing 
and using of material. Life is freedom, — life in the 
direct ratio of its amount. You may be sure, the 
new-born man is not inert. Life works both volun- 
tarily and supernaturally in its neighbourhood. Do 
you suppose he can be estimated by his weight in 



FATE. 25 

pounds, or that he is contained in his skin, — this 
reaching, radiating, jacuiating fellow ? The smallest 
candle fills a mile with its rajs, and the papillae of a 
man rmi out to every star. 

When there is something to be done, the world 
knows how to get it done. The vegetable eye makes 
leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or thorn, as the need is ; 
the first cell converts itself into stomach, mouth, 
nose, or nail, according to the want : the world throws 
its life into a hero or a shepherd ; and puts him where 
he is wanted. Dante and Columbus were Italians, 
in their time : they would be Russians or Americans 
to-day. Things ripen, new men come. The adapta- 
tion is not capricious. The ulterior aim, the purpose 
beyond itself, the correlation by which planets subside 
and crystallize, then animate beasts and men, will not 
stop, but will work into finer particulars, and from 
finer to finest. 

The secret of the world is, the tie between person 
and event. Person makes event, and event person. 
The "times," "the age," what is that, but a few 
profound persons and a few active persons who epito- 
mize the times ? — Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, 
Calhoun, Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, 
Astor, Brunei, and the rest. The same fitness must 
be presumed between a man and the time and event, 
as between the sexes, or between a race of animals 
and the food it eats, or the inferior races it uses. 
He thinks his fate alien, because the copula is hidden. 
But the soul contains the event that shall befall it, 
for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts ; 
and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted. 
The event is the print of your form. It fits you like 
your skin. What each does is proper to him. Events 
are the children of his body and mind. -We learn 
that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz sings: 

" Alas ! till now I had not known . 

My guide and fortune's guide are one." r ■*" * k 



26 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play 
for, — houses, land, money, luxury, power, fame, — are 
the selfsame thing, with a new gauze or two of illu- 
sion overlaid. And of all the drums and rattles by 
which men are made willing to have their heads 
broke, and are led out solemnly every morning to 
parade, — the most admirable is this by which we are 
brought to believe that events are arbitrary, and 
independent of actions. At the conjuror's, we detect 
the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have 
not eyes sharp enough to descry the thread that ties 
cause and effect. 

Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by 
making these the fruit of his character. Ducks take 
to the water, eagles to the sky, waders to the sea 
margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to counting- 
rooms, soldiers to the frontier. Thus events grow 
on the same stem with persons ; are sub-persons. 
The pleasure of life is according to the man that 
lives it, and not according to the work or the place. 
Life is an ecstasy. We know what madness belongs 
to love, — what power to paint a vile object in hues of 
heaven. As insane persons are indifferent to their 
dress, diet, and other accommodations, and, as we do 
in dreams, with equanimity, the most absurd acts, so, 
a drop more of wine in our cup of life will reconcile 
us to strange company and work. Each creature 
puts forth from itself its own condition and sphere, 
as the slug sweats out its slimy house on the pear- 
leaf, and the woolly aphides on the apple perspire 
their own bed, and the fish its shell. In youth, we 
clothe ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as 
the zodiac. In age, we put out another sort of per- 
spiration, — gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, 
fretting, and avarice. 

A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character. 
A man's friends are his magnetisms. We go to 
Herodtous and Plutarch for examples of Fate ; but 



FATE. 27 

we are examples. " Quisque suos patimur manes" 
The tendency of every man to enact all that is in his 
constitution is expressed in the old belief, that the 
efforts which we make to escape from onr destiny 
only serve to lead us into it : and I have noticed, a 
man likes better to be complimented oh his position, 
as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on 
&s merits. 

A man will see his character emitted in the events 
that seem to meet, but which exude from and accom- 
pany him. Events expand with the character. As 
once he found himself among toys, so now he plays a 
part in colossal systems, and his growth is declared 
in his ambition, his companions, and his performance. 
He looks like a piece of luck, but is a piece of causa- 
tion; — the mosaic, angulated and ground to fit into 
the gap he fills. Hence in each town there is some 
man who is, in his brain and performance, an ex- 
planation of the tillage, production, factories, banks, 
churches, ways of living, and society, of that town. 
If you do not chance to meet him, all that you see 
will leave you a little puzzled : if you see him, it will 
become plain. We know in Massachusetts who built 
New Bedford, who built Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, 
Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and many 
another noisy mart. Each of these men, if they were 
transparent, would seem to you not so much men, 
as walking cities, and, wherever you put them, they 
would build one. 

History is the action and reaction of these two, — 
Nature and Thought ; — two boys pushing each other 
on the curb-stone of the pavement. Everything is 
pusher or pushed : and matter and mind are in per- 
petual tilt and balance, so. Whilst the man is weak, 
the earth takes up him. He plants his brain and 
affections. By and by he will take up the earth, and 
have his gardens and vineyards in the beautiful order 
and productiveness of his thought. Every solid in 



28 CONDUCT OP LIFE. 

the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach 
of the mind, and the power to flux it is the measure 
of the mind. If the wall remain adamant, it accuses 
the want of thought. To a subtler force, it will 
stream into new forms, expressive of the character of 
the mind. What is the city in which we sit here, 
but an aggregate of incongruous materials, which 
have obeyed the will of some man? The granite 
was reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it 
came. Iron was deep in the ground, and well com- 
bined with stone ; but could not hide from his fires. 
Wood, lime, stuffs, fruits, gums, were dispersed over 
the earth and sea, in vain. Here they are, within 
reach of every man's day-labour, — what he wants of 
them. The whole world is the flux of matter over 
the wires of thought to the poles or points where it 
would build. The races of men rise out of the 
ground preoccupied with a thought which rules them, 
and divided into parties ready armed and angry to 
fight for this metaphysical abstraction. The quality 
of the thought differences the Egyptian and the 
Roman, the Austrian and the American. The men 
who come on the stage at one period are all found 
to be related to each other. Certain ideas are in the 
air. We are all impressionable, for we are made of 
them ; all impressionable, but some more than others, 
and these first express them. This explains the 
curious contemporaneousness of inventions and dis- 
coveries. The truth is in the air, and the most im- 
pressionable brain will announce it first, but all will 
announce it a few minutes later. So women, as most 
susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour. 
So the great man, that is, the man most imbued with 
the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man, — of 
a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light. He 
feels the infinitesimal attractions. His mind is righter 
than others, because he yields to a current so feeble 
as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised. 



FATE. 29 

The correlation is shown in defects. Moller, in 
his essay on architecture., taught that the building 
which was fitted accurately to answer its end, would 
turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not been 
intended. I find the like unity in human structures 
rather virulent and pervasive ; that a crudity in the 
blood will appear in the argument ; a hump in the 
shoulder will appear in the speech and handiwork. 
If his mind could be seen, the hump would be seen. 
If a man has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into 
his sentences, into his poem, into the structure of his 
fable, into his speculation, into his charity. And, as 
every man is hunted by his own dsemon, vexed by 
his own disease, this checks all his activity. 

So each man, like each plant, has his parasites. A 
strong, astringent, bilious nature has more truculent 
enemies than the slugs and moths that fret my leaves. 
Such an one has curculios, borers, knife-worms : a 
swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack, 
then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish 
as Moloch. 

This correlation really existing can be divined. If 
the threads are there, thought can follow and show 
them. Especially when a soul is quick and docile ; 
as Chaucer sings : 

" Or if the soul of proper kind 
Be so perfect as men find, 
That it wot what is to corne, 
And that he warneth all and some 
Of every of their aventures, 
By previsions or figures; 
But that our flesh hath not might 
It to understand aright 
For it is warned too darkly/' — 

Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, 
omen, periodicity, and presage : they meet the person 
they seek ; what their companion prepares to say to 
them, they first say to him; and a hundred signs 
apprise them of what is about to befall. 



30 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful con- 
stancy in the design, this vagabond life admits. We 
wonder how the fly finds its mate, and yet year after 
year we find two men, two women, without legal 
or carnal tie, spend a great part of their best time 
within a few feet of each other. And the moral is, 
that what we seek we shall find ; what we flee from 
flees from us ; as Goethe said, il what we wish for in 
youth, comes in heaps on us in old age," too often 
cursed with the granting of our prayer ; and hence 
the high caution, that, since we are sure of having 
what we wish, we beware to ask only for high things. 

One key, one solution to the mysteries of human 
condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, 
and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, 
of the double consciousness. A man must ride 
alternately on the horses of his private and his public 
nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw them- 
selves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot 
on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of 
the other. So when a man is the victim of his fate, 
has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind ; a 
club-foot and a club in his wit ; a sour face, and a 
selfish temper; a strut in his gait, and a conceit in 
his affection ; or is ground to powder by the vice of 
his race ; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, 
which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who 
suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures 
universal benefit by his pain. 

To offset the drag of temperament and race, which 
pulls down, learn this lesson, namely, that by the 
cunning co- presence of two elements, which is 
throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes you, 
draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay. 
A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. 
When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will 
bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a 
horse. 



FATE. 31 

Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which 
holds nature and souls in perfect solution, and com- 
pels every atom to serve an universal end. I do not 
wonder at a snow-flake, a shell, a summer landscape, 
or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of 
beauty under which the universe lies ; that all is and 
must be pictorial ; that the rainbow, and the curve of 
the horizon, and the arch of the blue vault are only 
results from the organism of the eye. There is no need 
for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of 
flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I 
cannot look without seeing splendour and grace. 
How idle to choose a random sparkle here or there, 
when the indwelling necessity plants the rose of 
beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central 
intention of Nature to be harmony and joy. 

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity. If 
we thought men were free in the sense, that, in a 
single exception, one fantastical will could prevail 
over the law of things, it were all one as if a child's 
hand could pull down the sun. If, in the least par- 
ticular, one could derange the order of nature, — who 
would accept the gift of life ? 

Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, 
which secures that all is made of one piece; that 
plaintiff and defendant, friend and enemy, animal 
and planet, food and eater, are of one kind. In 
astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system ; in 
geology, vast time, but the same laws as to-day. 
Why should we be afraid of Nature, which is no 
other than " philosophy and theology embodied ? " 
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, 
we who are made up of the same elements ? Let us 
build to the Beautiful Necessity, which makes man 
brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger 
that is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to 
the Necessity which rudely or softly educates him 
to the perception that there are no contingencies ; 



32 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which 
is not intelligent but intelligence, — not personal nor 
impersonal, — it disdains words and passes under- 
standing ; it dissolves persons ; it vivifies nature ; 
yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its 
omnipotence. 



II -p o w E E. 

His tongue was framed to music, 
And his hand was armed with skill; 
His face was the mould of beauty, 
And his heart the throne of will. 

There is not yet any inventory of a man's faculties, 
any more than a bible of his opinions. Who shall set 
a limit to the influence of a human being ? There 
are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry 
nations with them, and lead the activity of the human 
race. And if there be such a tie that, wherever the 
mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, per- 
haps there are men whose magnetisms are of that 
force to draw material and elemental powers, and, 
where they appear, immense instrumentalities or- 
ganize around them. Life is a search after power; 
and this is an element with which the world is so 
saturated, — there is no chink or crevice in which 
it is not lodged, — that no honest seeking goes unre- 
warded. A man should prize events and possessions 
as the ore in which this fine mineral is found ; and 
he can well afford to let events and possessions and 
the breath of the body go, if their value has been 
added to him in the shape of power. If he have 
secured .the elixir, he can spare the wide gardens 
from which it was distilled. A cultivated man, wise 
to know and bold to perform, is the end to which 
nature works, and the education of the will is 



POWER. 33 

the flowering and result of all this geology and 
astronomy. 

All successful men have agreed in one thing, — 
they were causationists. They believed that things 
went not by luck, but by law; that there was not 
a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the 
first and last of things. A belief in causality, or 
strict connection between every trifle and the prin- 
ciple of being, and, in consequence, belief in compen- 
sation, or that nothing is got for nothing, characterizes 
all valuable minds, and must control every effort that 
is made by an industrious one. The most valiant 
men are the best believers in the tension of the laws. 
" All the great captains," said Bonaparte, " have per- 
formed vast achievements by conforming with the 
rules of the art, — by adjusting efforts to obstacles." 

The key to the age may be this, or that, or the 
other, as the young orators describe ; the key to all 
ages is — Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority 
of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but 
certain eminent moments ; victims of gravity, custom, 
and fear. This gives force to the strong, — that the 
multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original 
action. 

We must reckon success a constitutional trait. 
Courage, the old physicians taught (and their mean- 
ing holds, if their physiology is a little mythical): 
courage, or the degree of life, is as the degree of cir- 
culation of the blood in the arteries. " During passion, 
anger, fury, trials of strength, wrestling, fighting, a 
large amount of blood is collected in the arteries, 
the maintenance of bodily strength requiring it, and 
but little is sent into the veins. This condition is 
constant with intrepid persons." Where the arteries 
hold their blood, is courage and adventure possible. 
Where they pour it unrestrained into the veins, the 
spirit is low and feeble. For performance of great 
mark, it needs extraordinary health. If Eric is in 

3 



34 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of 
his condition, and thirty years old, at his departure 
from Greenland, he will steer west, and his ships 
will reach Newfoundland. But take out Eric, and 
put in a stronger and bolder man — Biorn or Thorfin 
— arid the ships will, with just as much ease, sail 
six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles 
further, and reach Labrador and New England. 
There is no chance in results. With adults, as with 
children, one class enter cordially into the game, and 
whirl with the whirling world ; the others have cold 
hands, and remain bystanders, or are only dragged 
in by the humour and vivacity of those who can 
carry a dead weight. The first wealth is health. 
Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any 
one; it must husband its resources to live. But 
health or fulness answers its own ends, and has to 
spare, runs over, and inundates the neighbourhoods 
and creeks of other men's necessities. 

All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature 
of the world. The mind that is parallel with the 
laws of nature will be in the current of events, and 
strong with their strength. One man is made of 
the same stuff of which events are made; is in 
sympathy with the course of things ; can predict it. 
Whatever befalls, befalls him first; so that he is 
equal to whatever shall happen. A man who 
knows men, can talk well on politics, trade, law, 
war, religion. For, everywhere, men are led in the 
same manners. 

The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be sup- 
plied by any labour, art, or concert. It is like the 
climate, which easily rears a crop, which no glass, 
or irrigation, or tillage, or manures, can elsewhere 
rival. It is like the opportunity of a city like New 
York, or Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy 
to force capital or genius or labour to it. They come 
of themselves,, as the waters flow to it. So a broad, 



POWEK. 35 

healthy, massive understanding seems to lie on the 
shore of unseen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are 
covered with barks, that, night and day, are drifted 
to this point. That is poured into its lap, which 
other men lie plotting for. It is in everybody's 
secret ; anticipates everybody's discovery ; and if it 
do not command every fact of the genius and the 
scholar, it is because it is large and sluggish, and 
does not think them worth the exertion which 
you do. 

This affirmative force is in one, and is not in 
another, as one horse has the spring in him, and 
another in the whip. " On the neck of the young 
man," said Hafiz, " sparkles no gem so gracious as 
enterprise." Import into any stationary district, 
as into an old Dutch population in New York or 
Pennsylvania, or among the planters of Virginia, 
a colony of hardy Yankees, with seething brains, 
heads full of steam-hammer, pully, crank, and 
toothed wheel, — and everything begins to shine 
with values. What enhancement to all the water 
and land in England, is the arrival of James "Watt 
or Brunei ! In every company, there is not only 
the active and passive sex, but, in both men and 
women, a deeper and more important sex of mind, 
namely, the inventive or creative class of both men 
and women, and the uninventive or accepting class. 
Each plus man represents his set, and, if he have 
the accidental advantage of personal ascendancy, — 
which implies neither more nor less of talent, but 
merely the temperamental or taming eye of a soldier 
or a schoolmaster (which one has, and one has not, 
as one has a black moustache and one a blond), then 
quite easily, and without envy or resistance, all his 
coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to absorb 
them. The merchant works by book-keeper and 
cashier ; the lawyer's authorities are hunted up by 
clerks ; the geologist reports the surveys of his Sub- 
s'— 2 



36 COXDUCT OP LIFE. 

alterns; Commander Wilkes appropriates the results 
of all the naturalists attached to the Expedition; 
Thorwaldsens statue is finished by stone-cutters; 
Dumas has journeymen; and Shakspeare was theatre- 
manager, and used the labour of many young men, as 
■well as the playbooks. 

There is always room for a man of force, and 
he makes room for many. Society is a troop of 
thinkers, and the best heads among them take the 
best places. A feeble man can see the farms that 
are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. 
The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. 
His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun breeds 
clouds. 

When a new boy comes into school, when a 
man travels, and encounters strangers every day, 
or, when into any old club a new-comer is domes- 
ticated, that happens which befalls when a strange 
ox is driven into a pen or pasture where cattle are 
kept; there is at once a trial of strength between 
the best pair of horns and the new-comer, and it is 
settled thenceforth which is the leader. So now, 
there is a measuring of strength, very courteous, 
but decisive, and an acquiescence thenceforward 
when these two meet. Each reads his fate in the 
other's eyes. The weaker party finds, that none 
of his information or wit quite fits the occasion. 
He thought he knew this or that; he finds that 
he omitted to learn the end of it. Nothing that 
he knows will quite hit the mark, whilst all the 
rival's arrov T s are good, and well thrown. But if 
he knew all the facts in the encyclopaedia, it would 
not help him : for this is an affair of presence of 
mind, of attitude, of aplomb: the opponent has the 
sun and wind, and, in every cast, the choice of 
weapon and mark; and, when he himself is matched 
with some other antagonist, his own shafts fly well 
and hit. 'Tis a question of stomach and constitu- 



POWER. 37 

tion. The second man is as good as the first, — 
perhaps better ; but has not stoutness or stomach, 
as the first has, and so his wit seems over-fine or 
under-fine. 

Health is good, — power, life, that resists disease, 
poison, and all enemies, and is conservative, as 
well as creative. Here is question, every spring, 
whether to graft with wax, or whether with clay ; 
whether to whitewash or to potash, or to prune* 
but the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree, 
that agrees with the soil, will grow in spite of blight, 
or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by 
day, in all weathers and all treatments. Vivacity, 
leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed 
to be nice in choosing. We must fetch the pump 
with dirty water, if clean cannot be had. If we 
will make bread, we must have contagion, yeast, 
emptyings, or what not, to induce fermentation into 
the dough: as the torpid artist seeks inspiration 
at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by 
fiend, by prayer or by wine. And we have a certain 
instinct, that where is great amount of life, though 
gross and peccant, it has its own checks and purifi- 
cations, and will be found at last in harmony with 
moral laws. 

We watch in children, with pathetic interest, the 
degree in which they possess recuperative force. 
When they are hurt by us, or by each other, or 
go to the bottom of the class, or miss the annual 
prizes, or are beaten in the game, — if they lose 
heart, and remember the mischance in their chamber 
at home, they have a serious check. But if they 
have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies 
them with new interest in the new moment, — the 
wounds cicatrize, and the fibre is the tougher for 
the hurt. 

One comes to value this plus health, when he 
sees that all difficulties vanish before it, A timid 



38 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

man listening to the alarmists in Congress, and in 
the newspapers, and observing the profligacy of 
party, — sectional interests nrged with a fury which 
shuts its eyes to consequences, with a mind made 
up to desperate extremities, ballot in one hand, and 
rifle in the other, — might easily believe that he 
and his country have seen their best days, and he 
hardens himself the best he can against the com- 
ing ruin. But after this has been foretold with 
equal confidence fifty times, and government six 
per cents, have not declined a quarter of a mill, he 
discovers that the enormous elements of strength, 
which are here in play, make our politics unim- 
portant. Personal power, freedom, and the resources 
of nature strain every faculty of every citizen. 
We prosper with such vigour, that, like thrifty trees, 
which grow in spite of ice, lice, mice, and borers, so 
we do not suffer from the profligate swarms that 
fatten on the national treasury. ■ The huge animals 
nourish huge parasites, and the rancour of the 
disease attests the strength of the constitution. The 
same energy in the Greek Demos drew the remark, 
that the evils of popular government appear greater 
than they are; there is compensation for them in 
the spirit and energy it awakens. The rough and 
ready style which belongs to a people of sailors, 
foresters, farmers, and mechanics, has its advantages. 
Power educates the potentate. As long as our 
people quote English standards they dwarf their 
own proportions. A Western lawyer of eminence 
said to me he wished it were a penal offence to bring 
an English law-book into a court in this country, 
so pernicious had he found in his experience our 
deference to English precedent. The very word 
" commerce " has only an English meaning, and is 
pinched to the cramp exigencies of English expe- 
rience. The commerce of rivers, the commerce of 
railroads, and who knows but the commerce of air- 



POWEK. 39 

balloons, must add an American extension to the 
pond-hole of admiralty. As long as our people 
quote English standards, they will miss the sove- 
reignty of power; but let these rough-riders, — 
legislators in shirt-sleeves, — Hoosier, Sucker, Wol- 
verine, Badger, — or whatever hard head Arkansas, 
Oregon, or Utah sends, half orator, half assassin, to 
represent its wrath and cupidity at Washington, — 
let these drive as they may ; and the disposition of 
territories and public lands, the necessity of balanc- 
ing and keeping at bay the snarling majorities of 
German, Irish, and of native millions, will bestow 
promptness, address, and reason, at last, on our 
buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of man- 
ners. The instinct of the people is right. Men 
expect from good whigs, put into office by the 
respectability of the country, much less skill to deal 
with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or with our own mal- 
content members, than from some strong trans- 
gressor, like Jefferson, or Jackson, who first conquers 
his own government, and then uses the same genius 
to conquer the foreigner. The senators who dis- 
sented from Mr. Polk's Mexican war, were not those 
who knew better, but those who, from political posi- 
tion, could afford it ; not Webster, but Benton and 
Calhoun. 

This power, to be sure, is not clothed in satin. 
'Tis the power of Lynch law, of soldiers and pirates ; 
and it bullies the peaceable and loyal. But it brings 
its own antidote ; and here is my point, — that all 
kinds of power usually emerge at the same time ; 
good energy and bad ; power of mind, with physical 
health ; the extasies of devotion, with the exaspera- 
tions of debauchery. The same elements are always 
present, only sometimes these conspicuous, and some- 
times those; what was yesterday foreground, being 
to-day background, — what was surface, playing now 
a not less effective part as basis. The longer the 



40 CONDUCT OP LIFE. 

drought lasts, the more is the atmosphere surcharged 
with water. The faster the ball falls to the sun, the 
force to fly off is by so much augmented. And, in 
morals, wild liberty breeds iron conscience ; natures 
with great impulses have great resources, and return 
from far. In politics, the sons of democrats will be 
whigs ; whilst red republicanism, in the father, is a 
spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in 
the next age. On the other hand, conservatism, ever 
more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and 
drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism. 

Those who have most of this coarse energy, — the 
" bruisers," who have run the gauntlet of caucus and 
tavern through the county or the state, have their 
own vices, but they have the good nature of strength 
and courage. Fierce and unscrupulous, they are 
usually frank and direct, and above falsehood. Our 
politics fall into bad hands, and churchmen and men 
of refinement, it seems agreed, are not fit persons to 
send to Congress. Politics is a deleterious profession, 
like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have 
no opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, 
for any purpose, — and if it be only a question between 
the most civil and the most forcible, I lean to the last. 
These Hoosiers and Suckers are really better than 
the snivelling opposition. Their wrath is at least of 
a bold and manly cast. They see, against the unani- 
mous declarations of the people, how much crime the 
people will bear ; they proceed from step to step, and 
they have calculated but too justly upon their ex- 
cellencies, the New England governors, and upon 
their honours, the New England legislators. The 
messages of the governors and the resolutions of the 
legislatures, are a proverb for expressing a sham 
'virtuous indignation, which, in the course of events, 
is sure to be belied. 

In trade, also, this energy usually carries a trace of 
ferocity. Philanthropic and religious bodies do not 



POWER. 41 

commonly make their executive officers out of saints. 
The communities hitherto founded by Socialists, — ■ 
the Jesuits, the Port-Royalists, the American com-* 
munities at New Harmony, at Brook Farm, at Zoar, 
are only possible, by installing Judas as steward. 
The rest of the offices may be filled by good bur- 
gesses. The pious and charitable proprietor has a 
foreman not quite so pious and charitable. The 
most amiable of country gentlemen has a certain 
pleasure in the teeth of the bull-dog which guards his 
orchard. Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a 
sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent 
the devil to market. And in representations of the 
Deity, painting, poetry, and popular religion have 
ever drawn the wrath from hell. It is an esoteric 
doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to 
make muscle ; as if conscience were not good for 
hands and legs, as if poor decayed formalists of law 
and order cannot run like wild goats, wolves and 
conies ; that, as there is a use in medicine for poisons, 
so the world cannot move without rogues ; that public 
spirit and the ready hand are as well found among 
the malignants. 'Tis not very rare, the coincidence 
of sharp private and political practice, with public 
spirit, and good neighbourhood. 

I knew a burly Boniface who for many years kept 
a public-house in one of our rural capitals. He was 
a knave whom the town could ill spare. He was a 
social, vascular creature, grasping and selfish. There 
was no crime which he did not or could not commit. 
But he made good friends of the select men, served 
them with his best chop, when they supped at his 
house, and also with his honour the Judge he was 
very cordial, grasping his hand. He introduced all 
the fiends, male and female, into the town, and united 
in his person the functions of bully, incendiary, 
swindler, barkeeper, and burglar. He girdled the 
trees, and cut off the horses' tails of the temperance 



42 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

people, in the night. He led the " rummies " and 
radicals in town-meeting with a speech. Meantime, 
he was civil, fat, and easy, in his house, and precisely 
the most public-spirited citizen. He was active in 
getting the roads repaired and planted with shade- 
trees; he subscribed for the fountains, \\\q gas, and 
the telegraph ; he introduced the new horse-rake, the 
new scraper, the baby-jumper, and what not, that 
Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens. He did 
this the easier, that the pedlar stopped at his house, 
and paid his keeping, by setting up his new trap on 
the landlord's premises. 

Whilst thus the energy for originating and exe- 
cuting work deforms itself by excess, and so our axe 
chops off our own fingers, — this evil is not without 
remedy. All the elements whose aid man calls in, 
will sometimes become his masters, especially those 
of most subtle force. Shall he, then, renounce steam, 
fire, and electricity, or, shall he learn to deal with 
them? The rule for this whole class of agencies 
is, — all plus is good ; only put it in the right place. 

Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live 
on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies ; cannot read novels, 
and play whist ; cannot satisfy all their wants at the 
Thursday Lecture or the Boston Athenaeum. They 
pine for adventure, and must go to Pike's Peak ; had 
rather die by the hatchet of a Pawnee, than sit all 
day and every day at a counting-room desk. They 
are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting, 
and clearing ; for hair-breadth adventures, huge 
risks and the joy of eventful living. Some men 
cannot endure an hour of calm at sea. I remember 
a poor Malay cook, on board a Liverpool packet, 
who, when the wind blew a gale, could not contain 
his joy. " Blow !" he cried, " me do tell }^ou, blow !" 
Their friends and governors must see that some vent 
for their explosive complexion is provided. The 
roisters who are destined for infamy at home, if sent 



POWEE. 43 

to Mexico, will " cover you with glory," and come 
back heroes and generals. There are Oregons, Cali- 
fornias, and Exploring Expeditions enough apper- 
taining to America, to find them in files to gnaw, and 
in crocodiles to eat. The young English are fine 
animals, full of blood ; and when they have no wars 
to breathe their riotous valours in, they seek for 
travels as dangerous as war, diving into Maelstroms ; 
swimming Heilesponts ; wading up the snowy Him- 
maleh; hunting lion, rhinoceros, elephant, in South 
Africa ; gipsying with Borrow in Spain and Algiers ; 
riding alligators in South America with Waterton ; 
utilizing Bedouin, Sheik, and Pacha, with Layard ; 
yachting among the icebergs of Lancaster Sound; 
peeping into craters on the equator ; or running on 
the creases of Malays in Borneo. 

The excess of virility has the same importance 
in general history, as in private and industrial life. 
Strong race or strong individual rests at last on 
natural forces, which are best in the savage, who, like 
the beasts around him, is still in reception of the 
milk from the teats of nature. Cut off the connection 
between any of our works and this aboriginal source, 
and the work is shallow. The people lean on this, 
and the mob is not quite so bad an argument as we 
sometimes say, for it has this good side. " March 
without the people," said a French deputy from the 
tribune, " and you march into night : their instincts 
are a finger-pointing of Providence, always turned 
toward real benefit. But when you espouse an 
Orleans party, or a Bourbon, or a Montalembert 
party, or any other but an organic party, though 
you mean well, you have a personality instead of a 
principle, which will inevitably drag you into a 
corner." 

The best anecdotes of this force are to be had from 
savage life, in explorers, soldiers, and buccaneers. 
But who cares for fallings-out of assassins, and fights 



44 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

of "bears, or grindings of icebergs ? Physical force 
has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in 
snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. 
The luxury of ice is in tropical countries and mid- 
summer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little 
on our hearth : and of electricity, not volleys of the 
charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the 
battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy ; the rests or 
remains of it in the civil and moral man are worth 
all the cannibals in the Pacific. 

In history, the great moment is, when the savage 
is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy 
Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of 
beauty : — and you have Pericles and Phidias, — not 
yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Every- 
thing good in nature and the world is in that moment 
of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow r 
plentifully from nature, but their astringency or 
acridity is got out by ethics and humanity. 

The triumphs of peace have been in some proxi- 
mity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar 
with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp 
were still visible in the port and complexion of the 
gentleman, his intellectual power culminated: the 
compression and tension of these stern conditions is 
a training for the finest and softest arts, and can 
rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by 
some analogous vigour drawn from occupations as 
hardy as war. 

We say that success is constitutional ; depends on 
a plus condition of mind and body, on power of 
work, on courage; that it is of main efficacy in 
carrying on the world, and, though rarely found in 
the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener 
in the supersaturate or excess, which makes it dan- 
gerous and destructive, yet it cannot be spared, and 
must be had in that form, and absorbents provided to 
take off its edo;e. 



POWER. 45 

The affirmative class monopolize the homage of 
mankind. They originate and execute all the great 
feats. What a force was coiled up in the skull of 
Napoleon ! Of the sixty thousand men making his 
army at Eylau, it seems some thirty thousand were 
thieves and burglars. The men whom, in peaceful 
communities, we hold, if we can, with iron at their 
legs, in prisons, under the muskets of sentinels, this 
man dealt with, hand to hand, dragged them to their 
duty, and won his victories by their bayonets. 

This aboriginal might gives a surprising pleasure 
when it appears under conditions of supreme refine- 
ment, as in the proficients in high art. When 
Michel Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine Chapel 
in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went 
down into the Pope's gardens behind the Vatican, 
and with a shovel dug out ochres, red and yellow, 
mixed them with glue and water with his own 
hands, and having, after many trials, at last suited 
himself, climbed his ladders, and painted away, week 
after week, month after month, the sibyls and pro- 
phets. He surpassed his successors in rough vigour, 
as much as in purity of intellect and refinement. He 
was not crushed by his one picture left unfinished 
at last. Michel was wont to draw his figures first 
in skeleton, then to clothe them with flesh, and lastly 
to drape them. " All ! " said a brave painter to me, 
thinking on these things, " if a man has failed, you 
will find he has dreamed instead of working. There 
is no way to success in our art, but to take off your 
coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the rail- 
road, all day and every day." 

Success goes thus invariably with a certain plus 
or positive power : an ounce of power must balance 
an ounce of weight. And, though a man cannot 
return into his mother's womb, and be born with 
new amounts of vivacity, yet there are two econo- 
mies, which are the best succedanea which the case 



46 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

admits. The first is, the stopping off decisively our 
miscellaneous activity,, and concentrating our force 
on one or a few points ; as the gardener, by severe 
pruning, forces the sap of the tree into one or two 
vigorous limbs, instead of suffering it to spindle into 
a sheaf of twigs. 

" Enlarge not thy destiny," said the oracle ; 
"endeavour not to do more than is given thee in 

| charge." The one prudence in life is concentration ; 
the one evil is dissipation ; and it makes no differ- 
ence whether our dissipations are coarse or fine ; 
property and its cares, friends, and a social habit, or 
politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good 
which takes away one plaything and delusion more, 
and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful 
work. Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, 
flatteries, hopes — all are distractions which cause 
oscillations in our giddy balloon, and make a good 
poise and a straight course impossible. You must 
elect your work; you shall take what your brain 
can, and drop all the rest. Only so can that amount 
of vital force accumulate, which can make the step 
from knowing to doing. No matter how much faculty 
of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to 
doing is rarely taken. 'Tis a step out of a chalk 
circle of imbecility into fruitfulness. Many an artist 
lacking this, lacks all ^ he sees the masculine Angelo 
or Cellini with despair. He, too, is up to Nature 
and the First Cause in his thought. But the spasm 
to collect and swing his whole being into one act 
he has not. The poet Campbell said, ti^at " a man 

1 accustomed to work was equal to any achievement 
he resolved on, and that, for himself, necessity, not 
inspiration, was the prompter of his muse." 

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics^ 
in war, in trade — in short, in all management of 
human affairs. One of the high anecdotes of the 
world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry, <( how 



POWER. 47 

he had been able to achieve his discoveries ? "— et By 
always intending my mind." Or if you will have a 
text from politics, take this from Plutarch : — " There 
was, in the whole city, but one street in which 
Pericles was ever seen, the street which led to the 
market-place and the council house. He declined 
all invitations to banquets, and all gay assemblies 
and company. During the whole period of his ad- 
ministration, he never dined at the table of a friend." 
Or if we seek an example from trade — "I hope," 
said a good man to Rothschild, Ci your children are 
not too fond of money and business : I am sure you 
would not wish that." — " I am sure I should wish 
that : I wish them to give mind, soul, heart, and 
body to business ; that is the way to be happy. It 
requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal 
of caution to make a great fortune ; and, when you 
have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep 
it. If I were to listen to all the projects proposed to 
me, I should ruin myself very soon." " Stick to one 
business, young man. Stick to your brewery " (he 
said this to young Buxton), "and you will be the 
great brewer of London. Be brewer, and banker, 
and merchant, and manufacturer, and you will soon 
be in the Gazette." 

Many men are knowing, many are apprehensive 
and tenacious, but they do not rush to a decision. 
But in our flowing affairs a decision must be made, — 
the best, if you can ; but any is better than none. 
There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one 
is the shortest ; but set out at once on one. A man 
who has that presence of mind which can bring to 
him on the instant all he knows, is worth for action 
a dozen men who know as much, but can only bring 
it to light slowly. The good speaker in the House 
is not the man who knows the theory of parliamen- 
tary tactics, but the man who decides off-hand. The 
good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice 



48 CONDUCT OP LIFE, 

to every allegation, but who, aiming at substantial 
justice, rules something intelligible for the guidance 
of suitors. The good lawyer is not the man who has 
an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and 
qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws him- 
self on your part so heartily, that he can get you out 
of a scrape. Dr. Johnson said, in one of his flowing 
sentences : " Miserable beyond all names of wretch- 
edness is that unhappy pair, who are doomed to 
reduce beforehand to the principles of abstract reason 
all the details of each domestic day. There are cases 
where little can be said, and much must be done." 

The second substitute for temperament is drill, the 
power of use and routine. The hack is a better 
roadster than the Arab barb. In chemistry, the 
galvanic stream, slow, but continuous, is equal in 
power to the electric, spark, and is, in our arts, a 
better agent. So in human action, against the spasm 
of energy, we offset the continuity of drill. We 
spread the same amount of force over much time, 
instead of condensing it into a moment. 'Tis the 
same ounce of gold here in a ball, and there in a leaf. 
At West Point, Colonel Buford, the chief engineer, 
pounded with a hammer on the trunnions of a 
cannon, until he broke them off. He fired a piece 
of ordnance some hundred times in swift succession, 
until it burst. Now which stroke broke the trun- 
nion ? Every stroke. Which blast burst the piece ? 
Every blast. ff Diligence passe sens" Henry VIII. 
w T as wont to say, or, great is drill. John Kemble said 
that the worst provincial company of actors would go 
through a play better than the best amateur com- 
pany. Basil Hall likes to show that the worst 
regular troops will beat the best volunteers. Practice 
is nine-tenths. A course of mobs is good practice 
Tor orators. All the great speakers were bad speakers 
at first. Stumping it through England for seven 
years, made Cobden a consummate debater. Stump- 



POWER. 49 

ing it through New England for twice seven, trained 
Wendell Phillips. The way to learn German is, to 
read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred 
times, till you know every word and particle in 
them, and can pronounce and repeat them by heart. 
No genius can recite a ballad at first reading, so well 
as mediocrity can at the fifteenth or twentieth read- 
ing The rule for hospitality and Irish "help" is, to 
ha^ve the same dinner every day throughout the year. 
At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a 
nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are 
well served. A humorous friend of mine thinks, that 
the reason why Nature is so perfect in her art, and 
gets ap such inconceivably fine sunsets, is, that she 
has learned how, at last, by dint of doing the same 
thing so very often. Cannot one converse better on 
a topic on which he has experience, than on one 
which is new? Men whose opinion is valued on 
'change, are only such as have a special experience, 
and off that ground their opinion is not valuable. 
" More are made good by exercitation, than by 
nature," said Democritus. The friction in nature is 
so enormous that we cannot spare any power. It is 
not question to express our thought, to elect our way, 
but to overcome resistances of the medium and mate- 
rial in everything we do. Hence the use of drill, 
and the worthlessness of amateurs to cope with prac- 
titioners. Six hours every day at the piano, only to 
give facility of touch ; six hours a day at painting, 
only to give command of the odious materials, oil, 
ochres, and brushes. The masters say, that they 
know a master in music, only by seeing the pose of 
the hands on the keys; — so difficult and vital an act 
is the command of the instrument. To have learned 
the use of the tools, by thousands of manipulations ; 
to have learned the arts of reckoning, by endless 
adding and dividing, is the power of the mechanic 
and the clerk. 

4 



50 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

I remarked in England, in confirmation of a fre- 
quent experience at home, that, in literary circles, the 
men of trust and consideration, bookmakers, editors, 
university deans and professors, bishops, too, were by 
no means men of the largest literary talent, but usually 
of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of 
mercantile activity and working talent. Indifferent 
hacks and mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces 
to a lucrative point, or by working power, over mul- 
titudes of superior men, in Old as in New England. 

I have not forgotten that there are sublime con- 
siderations which limit the value of talent and super- 
ficial success. We can easily overpraise the vulgar 
hero. There are sources on which we hare not 
drawn. I know what I abstain from. I adjourn 
what I have to say on this topic to the chapters on 
Culture and Worship. But this force or spirit, 
being the means relied on by Nature for bringing the 
work of the day about, — as far as we attach im- 
portance to household life, and the prizes of the 
world, we must respect that. And I hold, that an 
economy may be applied to it ; it is as much a sub- 
ject of exact law and arithmetic as fluids and gases 
are ; it may be husbanded, or wasted ; every man 
is efficient only as he is a container or vessel of this 
force, and never was any signal act or achievement 
in history, but by this expenditure. This is not 
gold, but the gold-maker; not the fame, but the 
exploit. 

If these forces and this husbandry are within 
reach of our will, and the laws of them can be read, 
we infer that all success, and all conceivable benefit 
for man, is also, first or last, within his reach, and 
has its own sublime economies by which it may be 
attained. The world is mathematical, and has no 
casualty, in all its vast and flowing curve. Success 
has no more eccentricity, than the gingham and 
muslin we weave in our mills. I know no more 



WEALTH. 51 

affecting lesson to our busy, plotting New England 
brains, than to go into one of the factories with 
which we have lined all the watercourses in the 
States. A man hardly knows how much he is a 
machine, until he begins to make telegraph, loom, 
press, and locomotive, in his own image. But in 
these, he is forced to leave out his follies and hin- 
drances, so that when we go to the mill, the machine 
is more moral than we. Let a -man dare go to a 
loom, and see if he be equal to it. Let machine 
confront machine, and see how they come out. The 
world-mill is more complex than the calico-mill, and 
the architect stooped less. In the gingham-mill, a 
broken thread or a shred spoils the web through 
a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced back to 
the girl who wove it, and lessens her wages. The 
stockholder, on being shown this, rubs his hands 
with delight. Are you so cunning, Mr. Profitless, 
and do you expect to swindle your master and 
employer, in the web you weave ? A day is a more 
magnificent cloth than any muslin, the mechanism 
that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you shall 
not conceal the sleezy, fraudulent, rotten hours you 
have slipped into the piece, nor fear that any honest 
thread, or straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, 
will not testify in the web. 



III.-WEAITH. 

« Who shall tell what did befall, 
Par away in time, when once, 
Over the lifeless ball, 
Hung idle stars and suns? 
What god the element obeyed? 
Wings of what wind the lichen bore, 
Wafting the puny seeds of power, 
Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade? 

4—2 



52 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

And well the primal pioneer 

Knew the strong task to it assigned 

Patient through Heaven's enormous year 

To build in matter home for mind. 

From air the creeping centuries drew 

The matted thicket low and wide, 

This must the leaves of ages strew 

The granite slab to clothe and hide, 

Ere wheat can wave its golden pride. 

What smiths, and. in what furnace, rolled 

(In dizzy aeons dim and mute 

The reeling brain can ill compute) 

Copper and iron, lead and gold? 

What oldest star the fame can save 

Of races perishing to pave 

The planet with a floor of lime? 

Dust is their pyramid and mole: 

Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed 

Under the tumbling mountain's breast, 

In the safe herbal of the coal? 

But when the quarried means were piled, 

All is waste and worthless, till 

Arrives the wise selecting will, 

And, out of slime and chaos, Wit 

Draws the threads of fair and fit. 

Then temples rose, and towns, and marts, 

The shop of toil, the hall of arts ; 

Then flew the sail across the seas 

To feed the North from tropic trees; 

The storm-wind wove, the torrent span, 

Where they were bid the rivers ran ; 

New slaves fulfilled the poet's dream, 

Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam. 

Then docks were built, and crops were ored, 

And ingots added to the hoard. 

But, though light-headed man forget, 

Remembering Matter pays her debt: 

Still, through her motes and masses draw 

Electric thrills and ties of Law, 

Which bind the strengths of Nature wild 

To the conscience of a child. 

As soon as a stranger is introduced into any company, 
one of the first questions which all wish to have 
answered, is how does that man get his living ? And 
with reason. He is no whole man until he knows 
how to earn a blameless livelihood. Society is bar- 
barous, until every industrious man can get his 
living without dishonest customs. 



WEALTH. 53 

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a 
producer. He fails to make his place good in the 
world, unless he not only pays his debt, but also 
adds something to the common wealth. Nor can he 
do justice to his genius, without making some larger 
demand on the world than a bare subsistence. He is 
by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich. 

Y^ealth has its source in applications of the mind 
to nature, from the rudest strokes of spade and axe, 
up to the last secrets of art. Intimate ties subsist 
between thought and all production ; because a 
better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute 
labour. The forces and the resistances are Nature's, 
but the mind acts in bringing things from where 
they abound to where they are wanted ; in wise 
combining ; in directing the practice of the useful 
arts, and in the creation of finer values, by fine art, 
by eloquence, by song, or the reproductions of 
memory. Wealth is in applications of mind to nature ; 
and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, 
much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeli- 
ness, in being at the right spot. One man has 
stronger arms, or longer legs ; another sees by the 
course of streams, and growth of markets, where 
land will be wanted, makes a clearing to the river, 
goes to sleep, and wakes up rich. Steam is no 
stronger now, than it was a hundred years ago ; but 
is put to better use. A clever fellow was acquainted 
with the expansive force of steam ; he also saw the 
wealth of wheat and grass rotting in Michigan. 
Then he cunningly screws on the steam-pipe to the 
wheat-crop. Pun now, O Steam ! The steam puffs 
and expands as before, but this time it is dragging all 
Michigan at its back to hungry New York and hungry 
England. Coal lay in ledges under the ground since 
the Flood, until a labourer with, pick and windlass 
brings it to the surface. We may well call it black 
diamonds. Every basket is power and civilization. 



54 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

For coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of 
the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle: and 
it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever 
it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in 
the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce 
of coal ivill draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, 
by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as 
Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial 
power. 

When the farmer's peaches are taken from under 
the tree, and carried into town, they have a new look, 
and a hundredfold value over the fruit which grew on 
the same bough, and lies fulsomely on the ground. 
The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing 
from where it abounds, to where it is costly. 

Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain 
and wind out ; in a good pump that yields you plenty 
of sweet water ; in two suits of clothes, so to change 
your dress when you are wet ; in dry sticks to burn ; 
in a good double-wick lamp ; and three meals ; in a 
horse, or a locomotive, to cross the land ; in a boat to 
cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to 
read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by tools and 
auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our 
powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and 
blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good- 
will. 

Wealth begins with these articles of necessity. 
And here we must recite the iron law which Nature 
thunders in these northern climates. First, she re- 
quires that each man should feed himself. If, happily, 
his fathers have left him no inheritance, he must go 
to work, and by making his wants less, or his gains 
more, he must draw himself out of that state of pain 
and insult in which she forces the beggar to lie. She 
gives him no rest until this is done: she starves, 
taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, 
laughter, sleep, friends, and daylight, until he has 



WEALTH. 55 

fought his way to his own loaf. Then, less peremp- 
torily, but still with sting enough, she urges him to 
the acquisition of such things as belong to him. 
Every warehouse and shop-window, every fruit-tree, 
every thought of every hour, opens a new want to 
him, which it concerns his power and dignity to 
gratify. It is of no use to argue the wants down : 
the philosophers have laid the greatness of man in 
making his wants few ; but will a man content him- 
self with a hut and a handful of dried pease? He 
is born to be rich. He is thoroughly related; and 
is tempted out by his appetites and fancies to the 
conquest of this and that piece of nature, until he 
finds his well-being in the use of his planet, and of 
more planets than his own. Wealth requires, besides 
the crust of bread and the roof, — the freedom of the 
city, the freedom of the earth, travelling, machinery, 
the benefits of science, music, and fine arts, the best 
culture, and the best company. He is the rich man 
who can avail himself of all men's faculties. He is 
the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit 
from the labours of the greatest number of men, of 
men in distant countries, and in past times. The 
same correspondence that is between thirst in the 
stomach, and water in the spring, exists between the 
whole of man and the whole of nature. The elements 
offer their service to him. The sea, washing the 
equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and the 
power and empire that follow it, day by day, to his 
craft and audacity. "'Beware of me," it says, "but 
if you can hold me, I am the key to all the lands." 
Fire offers, on its side, an equal power. Fire, steam, 
lightning, gravity, ledges of rock, mines of iron, lead, 
quicksilver, tin, and gold ; forests of all woods : fruits 
of all climates ; animals of all habits ; the powers of 
tillage ; the fabrics of his chemic laboratory ; the 
webs of his loom ; the masculine draught of his loco- 
motive, the talismans of the machine-shop ; all grand 



56 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

and subtile tilings, minerals, gases, ethers, passions, 
war, trade, government, are his natural playmates, 
and, according to the excellence of the machinery in 
each human being, is his attraction for the instru- 
ments he is to employ. The world is his tool-chest, 
and he is successful, or his education is carried on 
just so far, as is the marriage of his faculties with 
nature, or the degree in which he takes up things 
into himself. 

The strong race is strong on these terms. The 
Saxons are the merchants of the world ; now, for a 
thousand years, the leading race, and by nothing 
more than their quality of personal independence, 
and, in its special modification, pecuniary independ- 
ence. No reliance for bread and games on the 
government, no clanship, no patriarchal style of 
living by the revenues of a chief, no marrying-on, 
— no system of clientsliip suits them ; but every 
man must pay his scot. The English are prosperous 
and peaceable, with their habit of considering that 
every man must take care of himself, and has himself 
to thank, if he do not maintain and improve his 
position in society. 

The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, 
inasmuch as it is a peremptory point of virtue that 
a man's independence be secured. Poverty demo- 
ralizes. A man in debt is so far a slave ; and Wall- 
street thinks it easy for a millionnaire to be a man 
of his word, a man of honour, but, that, in failing 
j circumstances, no man can be relied on to keep his 
j integrity. And when one observes in the hotels and 
! palaces of our Atlantic capitals, the habit of expense, 
the riot of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship, 
fellow-feeling of any kind, he feels, that, when a man 
or a woman is driven to the wall, the chances of 
integrity are frightfully diminished, as if virtue were 
coming to be a luxury which few could afford, or, 
as Burke said, " at a market almost too high for 



WEALTH. 57 

humanity." He may fix his inventory of necessities 
and of enjoyments on what scale he pleases, but if he 
wishes the power and privilege of thought, the chalk- 
ing out his own career, and having society on his own 
terms, he must bring his wants within his proper 
power to satisfy. 

The manly part is to do with might and main 
what you can do. The world is full of fops who 
never did anything, and who have persuaded beauties 
and men of genius to wear their fop livery, and these 
will deliver the fop opinion, that it is not respectable 
to be seen earning a living; that it is much more 
respectable to spend without earning ; and this doc- 
trine of the snake will come also from the elect sons 
of light ; for wise men are not wise at all hours, and 
will speak five times from their taste or their humour, 
to once from their reason. The brave workman, who 
might betray his feeling of it in his manners, if he do 
not succumb in his practice, must replace the grace 
or elegance forfeited, by the merit of the work done. 
No matter whether he make shoes, or statues, or 
laws. It is the privilege of any human work which 
is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughti- 
ness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose 
faithful work will answer for him. The mechanic at 
his bench carries a quiet heart and assured manners, 
and deals on even terms with men of any condition. 
The artist has made his picture so true, that it dis- 
concerts criticism. The statue is so beautiful, that 
it contracts no stain from the market, but makes the 
market a silent gallery for itself. The case of the 
young lawyer was pitiful to disgust, — a paltry matter 
of buttons or tw eezer-cases ; but the determined youth 
saw in it an aperture to insert his dangerous wedges, 
made the insignificance of the thing forgotten, and 
gave fame by his sense and energy to the name and 
affairs of the Tittleton snuffbox factory. 

Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is 



58 CONDUCT OF LIEE. 

made a toy. The life of pleasure is so ostentatious, 
that a shallow observer must believe that this is the 
agreed best use of wealth, and, whatever is pretended, 
it ends in cosseting. But, if this were the main use 
of surplus capital, it would bring us to barricades, 
burned towns, and tomahawks, presently. Men of 
sense esteem wealth to be the assimilation of nature 
to themselves, the converting of the sap and juices of 
the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their 
design. Power is what they want, — not candy ; — ■ 
power to execute their design, power to give legs and 
feet, form and actuality to their thought, which, to 
a clear-sighted man, appears the end for which the 
Universe exists, and all its resources might be well 
applied. Columbus thinks that the sphere is a problem 
for practical navigation, as well as for closet geometry, 
and looks on all kings and peoples as cowardly lands- 
men, until they dare fit him out. Few men on the 
planet have more truly belonged to it. But he was 
forced to leave much of his map blank. His suc- 
cessors inherited his map, and inherited his fury to 
complete it. 

So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and 
survey, — the monomaniacs, who talk up their pro- 
ject in marts, and offices, and entreat men to sub- 
scribe; — how did our factories get built? how did 
North America get netted with iron rails, except by 
the importunity of these orators, who dragged all the 
prudent men in ? Is party the madness of many for 
the gain of a few ? This speculative genius is the 
madness of few for the gain of the world. The 
projectors are sacrificed, but the public is the gainer. 
Each of these idealists, working after his thought, 
would make it tyrannical, if he could. He is met 
and antagonized by other speculators, as hot as he. 
The equilibrium is preserved by these counteractions, 
as one tree keeps down another in the forest, that it 
may not absorb all the sap in the ground. And the 



WEALTH. 59 

supply in nature of railroad presidents, copper- 
miners, grand- junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-anni- 
hilators, &c, is limited by the same law wbicn keeps 
the proportion in the supply of carbon, of alum, and 
of hydrogen. 

To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the 
master-works and chief men of each race. It is to 
have the sea, by voyaging ; to visit the mountains, 
Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris, Constan- 
tinople; to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manu- 
factories. The reader of Humboldt's Cosmos follows 
the marches of a man whose eyes, ears, and mind are 
armed by all the science, arts, and implements which 
mankind have anywhere accumulated, and who is 
using these to add to the stock. So it is with 
Denon, Beckford, Belzoni, Wilkinson, Layard, Kane, 
Lepsms, and Livingston. " The rich man," says 
Saadi, " is everywhere expected and at home." The 
rich take up something more of the world into 
man's life. They include the country as well as 
the town, the ocean-side, the White Hills, the Far 
West, and the old European homesteads of man, 
in their notion of available material. The world 
is his, who has money to go over it. He arrives 
at the sea-shore, and a sumptuous ship has floored 
and carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic, and 
made it a luxurious hotel, amid the horrors of 
tempests. The Persians say : (e 'Tis the same to 
him who wears a shoe, as if the whole earth were 
covered with leather." 

Kings are said to have long arms, but every man 
should have long arms, and should pluck his living, 
his instruments, his power, and his knowing, from the 
sun, moon, and stars. Is not then the demand to be 
rich legitimate? Yet, I have never seen a rich man. 
I have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to 
be, or, with an adequate command of nature. The 
pulpit and the press have many commonplaces 



60- CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

denouncing the thirst for wealth ; but if men should 
take these moralists at their word., and leave off 
aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to re- 
kindle at all hazards this love of power in the people, 
lest civilization should be undone. Men are urged 
by their ideas to acquire the command over nature. 
Ages derive a culture from the wealth of Roman 
Caesars, Leo Tenths, magnificent Kings of France, 
Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Dukes of Devonshire, 
Townleys, Vernons, and Peels, in England ; or what- 
ever great proprietors. It is the interest of all men, 
that there should be Vaticans and Louvres full of 
noble works of art ; British Museums, and French 
Gardens of Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Na- 
tural History, Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Con- 
gressional Libraries. It is the interest of all that 
there should be Exploring Expeditions ; Captain 
Cooks to voyage round the world, Rosses, Franklins, 
Richardsons, aDcl Kanes, to find the magnetic and 
the geographic poles. We are all richer for the 
measurement of a degree of latitude on the earth's 
surface. Our navigation is safer for the chart. 
How intimately our knowledge of the system of the 
Universe rests on that ! — and a true economy in a 
state or an individual will forget its frugality in 
behalf of claims like these. 

Whilst it is each man's interest, that, not only 
ease and convenience of living, but also wealth or 
surplus product should exist somewhere, it need not 
be in his hands. Often it is very undesirable to him. 
Goethe said well, " nobody should be rich but those 
who understand it." Some men are born to own, 
and can animate all their possessions. Others can- 
not : their owning is not graceful ; seems to be a 
compromise of their character: they seem to steal 
their own dividends. They should own who can 
administer ; not they who hoard and conceal ; not they 
who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the 



WEALTH. 61 

greater beggars, but they whose work carves out 
work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the 
rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is 
the poor man in whom the people are poor : and how 
to give all access to the masterpieces of art and 
nature, is the problem of civilization. The socialism 
of our day has done good service in setting men 
on thinking how certain civilizing benefits, now only 
enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by all. For 
example, the providing to each man the means and 
apparatus of science, and of the arts. There are 
many articles good for occasional use, which few 
men are able to own. Every man wishes to see the 
ring of Saturn, the satellites and belts of Jupiter and 
Mars ; the mountains and craters in the moon : yet 
how few can buy a telescope ! and of those, scarcely 
one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and 
exhibiting it. So of electrical and chemical appa- 
ratus, and many the like things. Every man may 
have occasion to consult books which he does not 
care to possess, such as cyclopedias, dictionaries, 
tables, charts, maps, and public documents : pictures 
also of buds, beasts, fishes, shells, trees, flowers, 
whose names he desires to know. 

There is a refining influence from the arts of 
Design on a prepared mind, which is as positive as 
that of music, and not to be supplied from any other 
source. But pictures, engravings, statues, and casts, 
beside their first cost, entail expenses, as of galleries 
and keepers for the exhibition ; and the use which any 
man can make of them is rare ; and their value, too, 
is much enhanced by the numbers of men who can 
share their enjoyment. In the Greek cities, it was 
reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a 
property in a work of art, which belonged to all who 
could behold it. I think sometimes, — could I only 
have music on my own terms; — could I live in a 
great city, and know where I could go whenever 



62 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

I wished the ablution and inundation of musical 
waves, — that were a bath and a medicine. 

If properties of this kind were owned by states, 
towns, and lyceums, they would draw the bonds of 
neighbourhood closer. A town would exist to an 
intellectual purpose. In Europe, where the feudal 
forms secure the permanence of wealth in certain 
families, those families buy and preserve these things, 
and lay them open to the public. But in America, 
where democratic institutions divide every estate into 
small portions, after a few years, the public should 
step into the place of these proprietors, and provide 
this culture and inspiration for the citizen. 

Man was born to be rich, or, inevitably grows rich 
by the use of his faculties ; by the union of thought 
with nature. Property is an intellectual production. 
The game requires coolness, right reasoning, prompt- 
ness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labour 
drives out brute labour. An infinite number of 
shrewd men, in infinite years, have arrived at certain 
best and shortest ways of doing, and this accumu- 
lated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings, curings, 
manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the 
worth of our world to-day. 

Commerce is a game of skill, which every man 
cannot play, which few men can play well. The 
right merchant is one who has the just average of 
faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong 
affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what 
he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the 
truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in 
the man, for his good or bad fortune, and so, in 
making money. Men talk as if there were some 
magic about this, and believe in magic, in all parts 
of life. He know^s, that all goes on the old road, 
pound for pound, cent for cent, — for every effect a 
perfect cause, — and that good luck is another name 
for tenacity of purpose. He insures himself in every 



WEALTH. 63 

transaction, and likes small and sure gains. Probity 
and closeness to the facts are the basis, but the 
masters of the art add a certain long arithmetic. 
The problem is, to combine many and remote opera- 
tions, with the accuracy and adherence to the facts, 
which is easy in near and small transactions ; so to 
arrive at gigantic results, without any compromise 
of safety. Napoleon was fond of telling the story 
of the Marseilles banker, who said to his visitor, 
surprised at the contrast between the splendour of 
the banker's chateau and hospitality, and the mean- 
ness of the counting-room in which he had seen 
him: "Young man, you are too young to understand 
how masses are formed, — the true and only power, 
— whether composed of money, water, or men, it is 
all alike, — a mass is an immense centre of motion, 
but it must be begun, it must be kept up :" and he 
might have added, that the way in which it must be 
begun and kept up, is, by obedience to the law of 
particles. 

Success consists in close appliance to the laws of 
the world; and since those laws are intellectual and 
moral, an intellectual and moral obedience. Political 
Economy is as good a book wherein to read the life 
of man, and the ascendancy of laws over all private 
and hostile influences, as any Bible which has come 
down to us. 

Money is representative, and follows the nature 
and fortunes of the owner. The coin is a delicate 
meter of civil, social, and moral changes. The 
farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason. 
It is no waif to him. He knows how many strokes 
of labour it represents. His bones ache with the 
day's work that earned it. He knows how much 
land it represents ; how much rain, frost, and sun- 
shine. He knows that, in the dollar, he gives you 
so much discretion and patience, so much hoeing, 
and threshing. Try to lift his dollar ; you must lift 



64 CONDUCT 01? LIEE. 

all that weight. In the city, where money follows 
the skit of a pen, or a lucky rise in exchange, it 
comes to be looked on as light. I wish the farmer 
held it dearer, and would spend it only for real 
bread : force for force. 

The farmer's dollar is heavy, and the clerk's is 
light and nimble ; leaps out of his pocket ; jumps on 
to cards and faro-tables : but still more curious is 
its susceptibility to metaphysical changes. It is the 
finest barometer of social storms, and announces 
revolutions. 

Every step of civil advancement makes every 
man's dollar worth more. In California, the country 
where it grew, — what would it buy ? A few years 
since, it would buy a shanty, dysentery, hunger, bad 
company, and crime. There are wide countries, 
like Siberia, where it would buy little else to-day 
than some petty mitigation of suffering. In Rome, 
it will buy beauty and magnificence. Forty years 
ago, a dollar would not buy much in Boston. Now 
it will buy a great deal more in our old town, thanks 
to railroads, telegraphs, steamers, and the contem- 
poraneous growth of New York, and the whole 
country. Yet there are many goods appertaining to 
a capital city, which are not yet purchasable here, 
— no, not with a mountain of dollars. A dollar in 
Florida is not worth a dollar in Massachusetts. A 
dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, 
at last, of moral values. A dollar is rated for the 
corn it will buy, or, to speak strictly, not for the 
corn or house-room, but for Athenian corn, and 
Roman house-room, — for the wit, probity, and power, 
which we eat bread and dwell in houses to share and 
exert. Wealth is mental; wealth is moral. The 
value of a dollar is, to buy just things : a dollar goes 
on increasing in value with all the genius, and all 
the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is 
worth more than a dollar in a jail ; in a temperate, 



WEALTH. 65 

schooled, law-abiding community, than in some sink 
of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in 
constant play. 

The Bank-Note Detector is a useful publication. 
But the current dollar, silver or paper, is itself the 
detector of the right and wrong where it circulates. 
Is it not instantly enhanced by the increase of equity? 
If a trader refuses to sell his vote, or adheres to 
some odious right, he makes so much more equity in 
Massachusetts ; and every acre in the State is more 
worth, in the hour of his action. If you take out of 
State Street the ten honestest merchants, and put in 
ten roguish persons, controlling the same amount of 
capital, — the rates of insurance will indicate it ; the 
soundness of banks will show it ; the highways will 
be less secure ; the schools will feel it ; the children 
will bring home their little dose of the poison ; the 
judge will sit less firmly on the bench, and his deci- 
sions be less upright; he has lost so much support 
and constraint, — which all need ; and the pulpit will 
betray it, in a laxer rule of life. An apple-tree, if 
you take out every day for a number of days a load 
of loam, and put in a load of sand about its roots, — 
will find it out. An apple-tree is a stupid kind of 
creature, but, if this treatment be pursued for a short 
time, I think it would begin to mistrust something. 
And if you should take out of the powerful class 
engaged in trade a hundred good men, and put in a 
hundred bad, or, what is just the same thing, intro- 
duce a demoralizing institution, would not the dollar, 
which is not much stupider than an apple-tree, pre- 
sently find it out? The value of a dollar is social, 
as it is created by society. Every man who removes 
into this city, with any purchasable talent or skill in 
him, gives to every man's labour in the city a new 
worth. If a talent is anywhere born into the world, 
the community of nations is enriched; and, much 
more, with a new degree of probity. The expense 

5 



66 CONDUCT OF LITE, 

of crime, one of the principal charges of every nation, 
is so far stopped. In Europe, crime is observed to 
increase or abate with the price of bread. If the 
Rothschilds at Paris do not accept bills, the people 
at Manchester, at Paisley, at Birmingham, are forced 
into the highway, and landlords are shot down in 
Ireland. The police records attest it. The vibra- 
tions are presently felt in New York, New Orleans, 
and Chicago. Not much otherwise, the economical 
power touches the masses through the political lords. 
Rothschild refuses the Russian loan, and there is 
peace, and the harvests are saved. He takes it, and 
there is war, and an agitation through a large portion 
of mankind, with every hideous result, ending in 
revolution, and a new order. 

Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances. 
The basis of political economy is non-interference. 
The only safe rule is found in the self-adjusting meter 
of demand and supply. Do not legislate. Meddle, 
and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws. 
Give no bounties ; make equal laws : secure life and 
property, and you need not give alms. Open the 
doors of opportunity to talent and virtue, and they 
will do themselves justice, and property will not be 
in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, 
property rushes from the idle and imbecile, to the 
industrious, brave, and persevering. 

The laws of nature play through trade, as a toy- 
battery exhibits the effects of electricity. The level 
of the sea is not more surely kept than is the equili- 
brium of value in society, by the demand and supply; 
and artifice or legislation punishes itself, by reactions, 
gluts, and bankruptcies. The sublime laws play in- 
differently through atoms and galaxies. Whoever 
knows what happens in the getting and spending of 
a loaf of bread and a pint of beer ; that no wishing 
will change the rigorous limits of pints and penny 
loaves ; that, for all that is consumed, so much less 



WEALTH. 67 

remains in the basket and pot : but what is gone out 
of these is not wasted., but well spent, if it nourish 
his body* and enable him to finish his task ; — knows 
all of political economy that the budgets of empires 
can teach him. The interest of petty economy is 
this symbolization of the great economy; the way in 
which a house, and a private man's methods, tally 
with the solar system, and the laws of give and take, 
throughout nature; and, however wary we are of the 
falsehoods and petty tricks which we suicidally play 
off on each other, every man has a certain satisfac- 
tion, whenever his dealing touches on the inevitable 
facts; when he sees that things themselves dictate the 
price, as they always tend to do, and, in large manu- 
factures, are seen to do. Your paper is not fine or 
coarse enough, — is too heavy, or too thin. The manu- 
facturer says, he will furnish you with just that thick- 
ness or thinness you want ; the pattern is quite indif- 
ferent to him ; here is his schedule ; — any variety of 
paper, as cheaper or dearer, with the prices annexed. 
A pound of paper costs so much, and you may have 
it made up in any pattern you fancy. 

There is in all our dealings a self-regulation that 
supersedes chaffering. You will rent a house, but 
must have it cheap. The owner can reduce the rent, 
but so he incapacitates himself from making proper 
repairs, and the tenant gets not the house he would 
have, but a worse one; besides that, a relation a little 
injurious is established between landlord and tenant. 
You dismiss your labourer, saying, " Patrick, I shall 
send for you as soon as I cannot do without you." 
Patrick goes off contented, for he knows that the 
weeds will grow with the potatoes, the vines must be 
planted next week ; and however unwilling you may 
be, the cantelopes, crook-necks, and cucumbers will 
send for him. Who but must wish that all labour 
and value should stand on the same simple and surly 
market ? If it is the best of its kind, it will. We 

5—2 



68 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

must have joiner, locksmith, planter, priest, poet, 
doctor, cook, weaver, ostler ; each in turn, through 
the year. 

If a St. Michael's pear sells for a shilling, it costs 
a shilling to raise it. If, in Boston, the hest securities 
offer twelve per cent, for money, they have just six 
per cent, of insecurity. You may not see that the 
fine pear costs you a shilling, hut it costs the commu- 
nity so much. The shilling represents the number 
of enemies the pear has, and the amount of risk in 
ripening it. The price of coal shows the narrowness 
of the coal-field, and a compulsory confinement of the 
miners to a certain district. All salaries are reckoned 
on contingent, as well as on actual services. <( If the 
wind were always south-west by west," said the 
skipper, u women might take ships to sea." One 
might say, that all things are of one price ; that 
nothing is cheap or dear ; and that the apparent dis- 
parities that strike us, are only a shopman's trick of 
concealing the damage in your bargain. A youth 
coming into the city from his native New Hampshire 
farm, with its hard fare still fresh in his remembrance, 
boards at a first-class hotel, and believes he must 
somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin and Malthus, 
for luxuries are cheap. But he pays for the one con- 
venience of a better dinner, by the loss of some of 
the richest social and educational advantages. He 
has lost what guards ! what incentives ! He will 
perhaps find by and by, that he left the Muses at the 
door of the hotel, and found the Furies inside. 
Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure 
are not cheap. The ancient poet said, "the gods 
sell all things at a fair price." 

There is an example of the compensations in the 
commercial history of this country. When the 
European wars threw the carrying-trade of the 
world, from 1800 to 1812, into American bottoms, 
a seizure was now and then made of an American 



WEALTH. 69 

ship. Of course; the loss was serious to the owner, 
but the country was indemnified 3 for we charged 
threepence a pound for carrying cotton, sixpence for 
tobacco, and so on ; which paid for the risk and loss, 
and brought into the country an immense prosperity, 
early marriages, private wealth, the building of cities 
and of States; and, after the war was over, we 
received compensation over and above, by treaty, for 
all the seizures. Yfeli, the Americans grew rich 
and great. But the pay-day comes round. Britain, 
Eranee, and Germany, which our extraordinary 
profits had impoverished, send out, attracted by the 
fame of our advantages, first their thousands, then 
their millions of poor people, to share the crop. At 
first we employ them, and increase our prosperity : 
but, in the artificial system of society and of protected 
labour, which we also have adopted and enlarged, 
there come presently checks and stoppages. Then 
we refuse to employ these poor men. But they will 
not so be answered. They go into the poor rates, 
and, though we refuse wages, we must now pay the 
same amount in the form of taxes. Again, it turns out 
that the largest proportion of crimes are committed 
by foreigners. The cost of the crime, and the ex- 
pense of courts, and of prisons, we must bear, and the 
standing army of preventive police we must pay. 
The cost of education of the posterity of this great 
colony, I will not compute. But the gross amount 
of these costs will begin to pay back what we thought 
was a net gain from our transatlantic customers of 
1800. It is vain to refuse this payment. We can- | 
not get rid of these people, and we cannot get rid of ' 
their will to be supported. That has become an in- 
evitable element of our politics ; and, for their votes, 
each of the dominant parties courts and assists them 
to get it executed. Moreover, we have to pay, not 
what would have contented them at home, but what 
they have learned to think necessary here; so that 



70 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

opinion, fancy, and all manner of moral considerations 
complicate the problem. 

There are a few measures of economy which will 
bear to be named without disgust; for the subject 
is tender, and we may easily have too much of it ; 
and therein resembles the hideous animalcules of 
which our bodies are built up, — which, offensive in 
the particular, yet compose valuable and effective 
masses. Our nature and genius force us to respect 
ends, whilst we use means. We must use the means, 
and yet, in our most accurate using, somehow screen 
and cloak them, as we can only give them any 
beauty by a reflection of the glory of the end. 
That is the good head, which serves the end, and 
commands the means. The rabble are corrupted by 
their means : the means are too strong for them, and 
they desert then.' end. 

1. The first of these measures is that each man's 
expense must proceed from his character. As long 
as your genius buys, the investment is safe, though 
you spend like a monarch. Nature arms each man 
with some faculty which enables him to do easily 
some feat impossible to any other, and thus makes 
him necessary to society. This native determination 
guides his labour and his spending. He wants an 
equipment of means and tools proper to his talent. 
And to save on this point, were to neutralize the 
special strength and helpfulness of each mind. Do 
your work, respecting the excellence of the work, 
and not its acceptableness. This is so much economy, 
that, rightly read, it is the sum of economy. Pro- 
fligacy consists not in spending years of time or 
chests of money, — but in spending them off the line 
of your career. The crime which bankrupts men 
and States is, job-work, — declining from your main 
design, to serve a turn here or there. Nothing is 
beneath you, if it is in the direction of your life: 



WEALTH, 71 

nothing is great or desirable, if it is off from that. 
I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line 
and say, that society can never prosper, but must 
always be bankrupt, until every man does that which 
he was created to do. 

Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense 
which is not yours. Allston, the painter, was wont 
to say, that he built a plain house, and filled it with 
plain furniture, because he would hold out no bribe 
to any to visit him, who had not similar tastes to 
his own. We are sympathetic, and, like children, 
want everything we see. But it is a large stride to 
independence, — when a man, in the discovery of 
his proper talent, has sunk the necessity for false 
expenses. As the betrothed maiden, by one secure 
affection, is relieved from a system of slaveries,— 
the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing all, — so 
the man who has found what he can do, can spend 
on that, and leave all other spending. Montaigne 
said, when he was a younger brother he went 
brave in dress and equipage, but afterward his 
chateau and farms might answer for him. Let a man 
who belongs to the class of nobles, those, namely, 
who have found out that they can do something, 
relieve himself of all vague squandering on objects 
not his. Let the realist not mind appearances. Let 
him delegate to others the costly courtesies and 
decorations of social life. The virtues are economists, 
but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to 
humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good 
husband. A good pride is, as I reckon it, worth 
from five hundred to fifteen hundred a year. Pride 
is handsome, economical : pride eradicates so many 
vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as 
if it were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride. 
Pride can go without domestics, without fine clothes, 
can live in a house with two rooms, can eat potato, 
purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can 



72 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

travel afoot, can talk with, poor men, or sit silent well- 
contented in fine saloons. But vanity costs money, 
labour, horses, men, women, health, and peace, and 
is ■ .-till nothing at last, a long way leading nowhere. 
— Only one drawback ; proud people are intolerably 
selfish, and the vain are gentle and giving. 

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a 
genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or 
philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill pro- 
vider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter 
himself with duties which will embitter his days, 
and spoil him for his proper work. We had in this 
region, twenty years ago, among our educated men, 
a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a passionate desire to 
go upon the land, and unite farming to intellectual 
pursuits. Many effected their purpose, and made 
the experiment, and some became downright plough- 
men ; but all were cured of their faith that scholarship 
and practical farming (I mean, with one's own hands) 
could be united. 

With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale scholar 
leaves his desk to draw a freer breath, and get a 
juster statement of his thought, in the garden- walk. 
He stoops to pull up a purslain, or a dock, that is 
choking the young corn, and finds there are two: 
close behind the last, is a third ; he reaches out his 
hand to a fourth ; behind that, are four thousand and 
one. He is heated and untuned, and, by and by, 
wakes up from his idiot dream of chickweed and 
red-root, to remember his morning thought, and to 
find, that, with his adamantine purposes, he has been 
duped by a dandelion. A garden is like those per- 
nicious machineries we read of, every month, in the 
newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his 
hand, and draw in his arm, his leg, and his whole 
body to irresistible destruction. In an evil hour he 
pulled down his wall, and added a field to his home- 
stead. No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man 



WEALTH. 73 

own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave 
home, if he dare. Every tree and graft, every hill 
of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he ha? 
done, and all he means to do, stand in his way, like 
duns, when he would go out of his gate. The 
devotion to these vines and trees he finds poisonous. 
Long free walks, a circuit of miles, free his brain, 
and serve his body. Long marches are no hardship 
to him. He believes he composes easily on the 
hills. But this pottering in a few square yards of 
garden is dispiriting and drivelling. The smell of 
the plants has drugged him, and robbed him of 
energy. He finds a catalepsy in his bones. He 
grows peevish and poor-spiritedo The genius of 
reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resin- 
ous and vitreous electricity. One is concentrative 
in sparks and shocks : the other is diffuse strength ; 
so that each disqualifies its workman for the other's 
duties. 

An engraver, wdiose hands must be of an exquisite 
delicacy of stroke, should not lay stone walls. Sir 
David Brewster gives exact instructions for micro- 
scopic observation: — "Lie down on your back, 
and hold the single lens and object over your 
eye," &c. &c. How much more the seeker of ab- 
stract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt 
concentration, and almost a going out of the body to 
think ! 

2. Spend after your genius, and hj system. Nature 
goes by rule, not by sallies and saltations. There 
must be system in the economies. Saving and un- 
expensiveness will not keep the most pathetic family 
from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free spend- 
ing safe. The secret of success lies never in the 
amount of money, but in the relation of income to 
outgo ; as if, after expense has been fixed at a certain 
point, then new and steady rills of income, though 
never so small, being added, wealth begins. But 



74 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

in ordinary, as means increase, spending increases 
faster, so that large incomes, in England and else- 
where, are found not to help matters; — the eating 
quality of debt does not relax its voracity. When 
the cholera is in the potato, what is the use of plant- 
ing larger crops ? In England, the richest country 
in the universe, I was assured by shrewd observers, 
that great lords and ladies had no more guineas to 
give away than other people; that liberality with 
money is as rare and as immediately famous a virtue 
as it is here. Want is a growing giant whom the 
coat of Have was never large enough to cover. I 
remember, in Warwickshire, to have been shown a 
fair manor, still in the same name as in Shakspeare's 
time. The rent-roll, I was told, is some fourteen 
thousand pounds a year : but when the second son of 
the late proprietor was born, the father was perplexed 
how to provide for him. The eldest son must in- 
herit the manor; what to do with this supernume- 
rary ? He was advised to breed him for the Church, 
and to settle him in the rectorship, which was in the 
gift of the family ; which was done. It is a general 
rule in that country, that bigger incomes do not help 
anybody. It is commonly observed, that a sudden 
wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery, or a large 
bequest to a poor family, does not permanently enrich. 
They have served no apprenticeship to wealth, and, 
with the rapid wealth, come rapid claims : which 
they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is 
quickly dissipated. 

A system must be in every economy, or the best 
single expedients are of no avail. A farm is a 
good thing, when it begins and ends with itself, 
and does not need a salary, or a shop to eke it out. 
Thus, the cattle are a main link in the chain-ring. 
If the nonconformist or aesthetic farmer leaves out 
the cattle, and does not also leave out the want 
which the cattle must supply, he must fill the gap 



WEALTH. 75 

by begging or stealing. When men now alive were 
born, the farm yielded everything that was con- 
sumed on it. The farm yielded no money, and the 
farmer got on without. If he fell sick, his neighbours 
came in to his aid: each gave a day's work, or a 
half-day ; or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse, 
and kept his work even; hoed his potatoes, mowed 
his hay, reaped his rye ; well knowing that no man 
could afford to hire labour without selling his land. 
In autumn, a farmer could sell an ox or a hog, and 
get a little money to pay taxes withal. Now, the 
farmer buys almost all he consumes — tin-ware, cloth, 
sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad-tickets, and 
newspapers. 

A master in each art is required, because the 
practice is never with still or dead subjects, but they 
change in your hands. You think farm-buildings 
and broad acres a. solid property: but its value is 
flowing like water. It requires as much watching as 
if you were decanting wine from a cask. The farmer 
knows what to do with it, stops every leak, turns all 
the streamlets to one reservoir, and decants wine : 
but a blunderhead comes out of Cornhill, tries his 
hand, and it all leaks away. So is it with granite 
streets, or timber townships, as with fruit or flowers. 
Nor is any investment so permanent, that it can be 
allowed to remain without incessant watching, as the 
history of each attempt to lock up an inheritance 
through two generations for an unborn inheritor may 
show. 

When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the country, 
c*nd will keep his cow, he thinks a cow is a creature 
that is fed on hay, and gives a pail of milk twice a 
day. But the cow that he buys gives milk for three 
months ; then her bag dries up. What to do with a 
dry cow ? who will buy her ? Perhaps he bought 
also a yoke of oxen to do his work ; but they get 
blown and lame. What to do with blown and lame 



76 CONDUCT OF UFE. 

oxen ? The farmer fats his, after the spring-work is 
done, and kills them in the fall. But how can 
Cockayne, who has no pastures, and leaves his cottage 
daily in the cars, at business hours, be pothered with 
fatting and killing oxen ? He plants trees ; but 
there must be crops, to keep the trees in ploughed 
land. What shall be the crops ? He will have 
nothing to do with trees, but will have grass. After 
a year or two, the grass must be turned up and 
ploughed : now what crops ? Credulous Cockayne ! 

3. Help comes in the custom of the country, and 
the rule of Impera parendo. The rule is not to 
dictate, nor to insist on carrying out each of your 
schemes by ignorant wilfulness, but to learn prac- 
tically the secret spoken from all nature, that things 
themselves refuse to be mismanaged, and will show 
to the watchful their own law. Nobody need stir 
hand or foot. The custom of the country will do it 
all. I know not how to build or to plant; neither 
how to buy wood, nor what to do with the house-lot, 
the field, or the wood-lot, when bought. Never fear: 
it is all settled how it shall be, long beforehand, in 
the custom of the country, whether to sand, or 
whether to clay it, when to plough, and how to dress, 
whether to grass, or to corn ; and you cannot help or 
hinder it. Nature has her own best mode of doing 
each thing, and she has somewhere told it plainly, if 
we will keep our eyes and ears open. If not, she 
will not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer 
our own way to hers. How often we must remember 
the art of the surgeon, which, in replacing the broken 
bone, contents itself with releasing the parts from 
false position; they fly into place by the action of 
the muscles. On this art of nature all our arts rely. 

Of the two eminent engineers in the recent con- 
struction of railways in England, Mr. Brunei went 
straight from terminus to terminus, through moun- 
tains, over streams, crossing highways, cutting ducal 



WEALTH. 77 

estates in two, and shooting through this man's cellar, 
and that man's attic window, and so arriving at his 
end, at great pleasure to geometers, but with cost to 
his company. Mr. Stephenson, on the contrary, 
believing that the river knows the way, followed his 
valley, as implicitly as our Western Railroad follows 
the Westfiekl River, and turned out to be the safest 
and cheapest engineer. We say the cows laid out 
Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. Every 
pedestrian in our pastures has frequent occasion to 
thank the cows for cutting the best path through the 
thicket, and over the hills : and travellers and Indians 
know the value of a buffalo-trail, which is sure to be 
the easiest possible pass through the ridge. 

When a citizen, fresh from Dock Square, or Milk 
Street, comes out and buys land in the country, his 
first thought is to a fine outlook from his windows ; 
his library must command a western view — a sunset 
every day, bathing the shoulder of Blue Hills, 
Wachusett, and the peaks of Monadnoc and TTnca- 
noonuc. What, thirty acres, and all this magnifi- 
cence for fifteen hundred dollars ! It would be cheap 
at fifty thousand. He proceeds at once, his eyes 
dim with tears of joy, to fix the spot for his corner- 
stone. But the man who is to level the ground, 
thinks it will take many hundred loads of gravel to 
fill the hollow to the road. The stone-mason who 
should build the well thinks he shall have to dig 
forty feet : the baker doubts he shall never like to 
drive up to the door : the practical neighbour cavils 
at the position of the barn ; and the citizen comes to 
know that his predecessor the farmer built the house 
in the right spot for the sun and wind, the spring, and 
w r ater-drainage, and the convenience to the pasture, 
the garden, the field, and the road. So Dock Square 
yields the point, and things have their own way. 
Use has made the farmer wise, and the foolish citizen 
learns to take his counsel. From step to step he 



78 CONDUCT OE LIEE. 

comes at last to surrender at discretion. The farmer 
affects to take his orders ; hut the citizen says, " You 
may ask me as often as you will, and in what ingenious 
forms, for an opinion concerning the mode of "building 
my wall, or sinking my well, or laying out my acre, 
hut the hall will rebound to you. These are matters 
on which I neither know, nor need to know any- 
thing. These are questions which you, and not I, 
shall answer." 

Not less, within doors, a system settles itself para- 
mount and tyrannical over master and mistress, 
servant and child, cousin and acquaintance. 'Tis 
in vain that genius, or virtue, or energy of character, 
strive and cry against it. This is fate. And 'tis 
very well that the poor husband reads in a book of a 
new way of living, and resolves to adopt it at home : 
let him go home and try it, if he dare. 

4. Another point of economy is to look for seed 
of the same kind as you sow : and not to hope to buy 
one kind with another kind. Friendship buys friend- 
ship ; justice, justice ; military merit, military success. 
Good husbandry finds wife, children, and household. 
The good merchant, large gains, ships, stocks, and- 
money. The good poet, fame and literary credit; 
but not either, the other. Yet there is commonly a 
confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur 
lives for the moment; praises himself for it; and 
despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur, of 
course, is poor ; and Furlong a good provider. The 
odd circumstance is, that Hotspur thinks it a supe- 
riority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to 
be rewarded with Furlong's lands. 

I have not at all completed my design. But we 
must not leave the topic, without casting one glance 
into the interior recesses. It is a doctrine of phi- 
losophy, that man is a being of degrees ; that there 
is nothing in the world, which is not repeated in his 
body ; his body being a sort of miniature or summary 



WEALTH. 79 

of the world : then that there is nothing in his body, 
which is not repeated as in a celestial sphere in 
his mind : then, there is nothing in his brain, which 
is not repeated, in a higher sphere, in his moral 
system. 

5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things 
ascend, and the royal rule of economy is, that it 
should ascend also, or whatever we do must always 
have a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim, that money 
is another kind of blood : pecunia alter sanguis : or, 
the estate of a man is only a larger kind of body, and 
admits of regimen analogous to his bodily circula- 
tions. So there is no maxim of the merchant — e.g. 
(i Best use of money is to pay debts : " " Every 
business by itself : " " Best time is present time : " 
iC The right investment is in tools of your trade," or 
the like — which does not admit of an extended sense. 
The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are 
laws of the Universe. The merchant's economy is a 
coarse symbol of the soul's economy. It is, to spend 
for power, and not for pleasure. It is to invest 
income ; that is to say, to take up particulars into 
generals ; days into integral eras, — literary, emotive, 
practical, of its life, and still to ascend in its invest- 
ment. The merchant has but one rule, absorb and 
invest : he is to be capitalist : the scraps and filings 
must be gathered back into the crucible ; the gas and 
smoke mast be burned, and earnings must not go to 
increase expense, but to capital again. Well, the man 
must be capitalist. Will he spend his income, or will 
he invest ? His body and every organ is under the 
same law. His body is a jar, in which the liquor of 
life is stored. Will he spend for pleasure? The 
way to ruin is short and facile. Will he not spend, 
but hoard for power ? It passes through the sacred 
fermentations, by that law of Nature whereby every- 
thing climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigour 
becomes mental and moral vigour. The bread he 



80 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

eats is first strength and animal spirits ; it becomes, 
in higher laboratories, imagery and thought ; and in 
still higher results, courage and endurance. This is 
the right compound interest ; this is capital doubled, 
quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest 
power. 

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher 
plane ; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, 
that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in 
augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man en- 
riched, in repeating the old experiments of animal 
sensation, nor unless, through new powers and as- 
cending pleasures, he knows himself, by the actual 
experience of higher good, to be already on the way 
to the highest. 



IV.-CULTURE. 

Can rules or tutors educate 

The semigod whom we await? 

He must be musical, 

Tremulous, impressional, 

Alive to gentle influence 

Of landscape and of sky, 

And tender to the spirit-touch 

Of man's or maiden's eye: 

But, to his native centre fast, 

Shall into Future fuse the Past, 

And the world's flowing fates in his own mould recast. 

The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. 
"Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of 
wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the 
theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his 
power. A topical memory makes him an almanac ; 
. a talent for debate, a disputant ; skill to get money 
makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture re- 
duces these inflammations by invoking the aid of 
other powers against the dominant talent, and by 



CULTURE. 81 

appealing to the rank of powers. It watches success. 
For performance, nature has no mercy, and sacrifices 
the performer to get it done ; makes a dropsy or a 
tympany of him. If she wants a thumb, she makes 
one at the cost of arms and legs, and any excess of 
power in one part is usually paid for at once by some 
defect in a contiguous part. 

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentra- 
tion, that Nature usually in the instances where a 
marked man is sent into the world, overloads him 
with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working 
power. It is said, no man can write but one book ; 
and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its im- 
pression on all his performances. If she creates a 
policeman like Fouche, he is made up of suspicions 
and of plots to circumvent them. " The air," said 
Fouche, " is full of poniards." The physician Sanc- 
torius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his 
food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because 
the Canon Yeman's Tale illustrates the statute 
Hen, V. chap. 4, against alchemy. I saw a man 
who believed the principal mischiefs in the English 
State were derived from the devotion to musical 
concerts. A freemason, not long since, set out to 
explain to this country, that the principal cause of 
the success of General Washington was, the aid he 
derived from the freemasons. 

But worse than the harping on one string, Nature 
has secured individualism, by giving the private 
person a high conceit of his weight in the system. 
The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and 
bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 
'Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all consti- 
tutions. In the distemper known to physicians as 
chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and con- 
tinues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a 
metaphysical varioloid of this malady? The man 
runs round a ring formed bv his own talent, falls into 

6 



82 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world. 
It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying 
forms is a craving for sympathy. The sufferers 
parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, 
reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity 
them. They like sickness, because physical pain will 
extort some show of interest from the bystanders, as 
we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no 
account when grown people come in, will cough till 
they choke, to draw attention. 

This distemper is the scourge of talent, — of artists, 
inventors, and philosophers. Eminent spiritualists 
shall have an incapacity of putting their act or word 
aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing 
it is. Beware of the man who says, " I am on the 
eve of a revelation." It is speedily punished, inas- 
much as this habit invites men to humour it, and by 
treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a 
narrower selfism, and exclude him from the great 
world of God's cheerful fallible men and women. Let 
us rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable. Re- 
ligious literature has eminent examples, and if we 
run over our private list of poets, critics, philan- 
thropists, and philosophers, we shall find them in- 
fected with this dropsy, and elephantiasis, which we 
ought to have tapped. 

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable 
persons, that we must infer some strong necessity in 
nature which it subserves ; such as we see in the 
sexual attraction. The preservation of the species 
was a point of such necessity, that nature has secured 
it at all hazards by immensely overloading the pas- 
sion, at the risk of perpetual crime and disorder. So 
egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which 
each individual persists to be what he is. 

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with 
culture, but is the basis of it. Every valuable nature 
is there in its own right, and the student we speak 



CULTUKE, 83 

to must have a motherwit invincible by bis culture, 
which uses all books, arts, facilities, and elegancies 
of intercourse, but is never subdued and lost in them. 
He only is a well-made man who has a good deter- 
mination. And the end of culture is not to destroy 
this, God forbid ! but to train away all impediment 
and mixture, and leave nothing but pure power. 
Our student must have a style and determination, 
and be a master in his own specialty. But, having 
this, he must put it behind him. He must have a 
catholicity, a power to see with a free and disengaged 
look every object. Yet is this private interest and 
self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion 
who can look at objects for their own sake, and with- 
out affection or self-reference, he will find the fewest 
who will give him that satisfaction ; whilst most men 
are afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon 
as any object does not connect with their self-love. 
Though they talk of the object before them, they 
are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying 
little traps for your admiraiion. 

But after a man has discovered that there are 
limits to the interest which his private history has 
for mankind, he still converses with his family, or 
a few companions, — perhaps with half a dozen per- 
sonalities that are famous in his neighbourhood. In 
Boston, the question of life is the names of some 
eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, 
Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. 
Greenough? Have you heard Everett, Garrison, 
Father Taylor, Theodore Parker ? Have you 
talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, 
and Lacofrupees ? Then you may as well die. In 
New York, the question is of some other eight, or 
ten, or twenty. Have you seen a few lawyers, mer- 
chants, and brokers, — two or three scholars, two or 
three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers ? 
New York is a sucked orange. All conversation is 

6—2 



84 CONDUCT QE LIFE. 

at an end, when we have discharged ourselves of 
a dozen personalities, domestic or imported, which 
make up our American existence. Nor do we 
expect anybody to be other than a faint copy of 
these heroes. 

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company 
of intelligent men together again after ten years, 
and if the presence of some penetrating and calming 
genius could dispose them to frankness, what a con- 
fession of insanities would come up ! The " causes " 
to which we have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy, 
Whiggism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism, 
would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of 
wrath : and our talents are as mischievous as if each 
had been seized upon by some bird of prey, which 
had whisked him away from fortune, from truth, 
from the d.ear society of the poets, some zeal, some 
bias, and only when he was now grey and nerveless, 
was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to sober 
perceptions. 

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, 
that a man has a range of affinities, through which 
he can modulate the violence of any master-tones 
that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and 
succour him against himself. Culture redresses his 
balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, 
revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns 
him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion. 

'Tis not a compliment, but a disparagement, to 
consult a man only on horses, or on steam, or en 
theatres, or on eating, or on books, and, whenever 
he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to 
the bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse 
heaven of our forefathers, Thor's house had five 
hundred and forty floors ; and man's house has five 
hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility 
of adaptation and of transition through many related 
points, to wide contrasts and extremes. Culture lulls 



CULTURE. - 85 

his exaggeration, Ms conceit of his village or his city. 
We must leave our pets at home, when we go into 
the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good 
meaning and good sense. No performance is worth 
loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for cer- 
tain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy. In 
the Norse legend, Allfadir did not get a drink of 
Mimir's spring (the fountain of wisdom) until he 
left his eye in pledge. And here is a pedant that 
cannot unfold his wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at 
interruption by the best, if their conversation do not 
fit his impertinency, — here is he to afflict us with his 
personalities. 'Tis incident to scholars, that each of 
them fancies he is pointedly odious in his community. 
Draw him out of this limbo of irritability. Cleanse 
with healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore 
to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's 
spring. If you are the victim of your doing, who 
cares what you do ? We can spare your opera, your 
gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your history, your 
syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear for his 
distinction. His head runs up into a spire, and in- 
stead of a healthy man, merry and wise, he is some 
mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the individual. 
When she has points to carry, she carries them. To 
wade in marshes and sea-margins is the destiny of 
certain birds, and they are so accurately made for 
this, that they are imprisoned in those places. Each 
animal out of its habitat would starve. To the phy- 
sician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of 
one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and 
a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus 
we are victims of adaptation. 

The antidotes against this organic egotism are, 
the range and variety of attractions, as gained by 
acquaintance with the world, with men of merit, 
with classes of society, with travel, with eminent 
persons, and with the high resources of philo- 



86 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

sophy, art, and religion: books, travel, society, 
solitude. 

The hardiest sceptic who has seen a horse broken, 
a pointer trained, or who has visited a menagerie, 
or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not 
deny the validity of education. " A boy," says 
Plato, " is the most vicious of all wild beasts ; " and, 
in the same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne 
says, (C a boy is better unborn than untaught." The 
city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the 
back-country, a different style ; the sea, another ; the 
army, a fourth. We know that an army which can 
be confided in, may be formed by discipline ; that by 
systematic discipline all men may be made heroes : 
Marshal Lannes said to a French officer : " Know, 
Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he 
never was afraid." A great part of courage is the 
courage of having done the thing before. And, in all 
human action, those faculties will be strong which are 
used. Robert Owen said, " Give me a tiger, and I 
will educate him." J Tis inhuman to want faith in the 
power of education, since to meliorate is the law of 
nature ; and men are valued precisely as they exert 
onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, 
poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to 
be incurable. 

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal dis- 
temper. There are people who can never understand 
a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to 
your words, or any humour ; but remain literalists, 
after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, 
and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past 
the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can 
understand pitchforks and the cry of fire ! and I have 
noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of 
earthquakes. 

Let us make our education brave and preven- 
tive. Politics is an after-work, a poor patching. 



CULTURE. 87 

We are always a little late. The evil is done, 
the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agita- 
tion for repeal of that of which we ought to have 
prevented the enacting. We shall one day learn 
to supersede politics by education. What we call 
our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, 
gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the 
symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, 
in Education. 

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle 
them much the same advantage over the novice, as 
if you extended his life, ten, fifty, or a hundred 
years. And I think it the part of good sense to 
provide every fine soul with such culture, that it 
shall not, at thirty or forty years, have to say, " This 
which I might do is made hopeless through my want 
of weapons." 

But it is conceded that much of our training fails 
of effect; that all success is hazardous and rare; 
that a large part of our cost and pains is thrown 
away. Nature takes the matter into her own hands, 
and, though we must not omit any jot of our system, 
we can seldom be sure that it has availed much, or, 
that as much good would not have accrued from a 
different system. 

Books, as containing the finest records of human 
wit, must always enter into our notion of culture. 
The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, 
Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were 
well-read, universally educated men, and quite too 
wise to undervalue letters. Their opinion has 
weight, because they had means of knowing the 
opposite opinion. We look that a great man should 
be a good reader, or, in proportion to the spontaneous 
power should be the assimilating power. Good criti- 
cism is very rare, and always precious. I am always 
happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent 
superiority of Shakspeare over all other writers. I 



88 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

like people who like Plato. Because this love does 
not consist with self-conceit. 

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready 
for them. He sometimes gets ready very slowly. 
You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis 
the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to 
the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on 
his way to school, from the shop-windows. You 
like the strict rules and the long terms ; and he 
finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and 
refuses any companions but of his choosing. He 
hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, 
fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is 
right ; and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, 
if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training. 
Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and 
boat, are all educators, liberalizers ; and so are 
dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and — provided 
only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and 
ingenuous strain — these will not serve him less 
than the books. He learns chess, whist, dancing, 
and theatricals. The father observes that another 
boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same 
time. But the first boy has acquired much more 
than these poor games along with them. He is 
infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but 
presently will find out, as you did, that when he rises 
from the game too long played, he is vacant and 
forlorn, and despises himself. Thenceforward it 
takes place with other things, and has its due 
weight in his experience. These minor skills and 
accomplishments, for example, dancing, are tickets 
of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the 
being master of them enables the youth to judge 
intelligently of much, on which, otherwise, he 
would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, " I 
have suffered more from my bad dancing, than from 
all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put 



CULTURE. 89 

together." Provided always the boy is teachable 
(for we are not proposing to make a statue out of 
punk), football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, 
climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of 
power, which it is his main business to learn, — 
riding, specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury 
said, " a good rider on a good horse is as much 
above himself and others as the world can make 
him." Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and 
horse, constitute, among all who use them, secret 
freemasonries. They are as if they belonged to one 
club. 

There is also a negative value in these arts. 
Their chief use to the youth is, not amusement, but 
to be known for what they are, and not to remain to 
him occasions of heartburn. We are full of super- 
stitions. Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages 
it has not ; the refined, on rude strength ; the demo- 
crat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a 
college education is, to show the boy its little avail. 
I knew a leading man in a leading city, who, having 
set his heart on an education at the university, and 
missed it, could never quite feel himself the equal of 
his own brothers who had gone thither. His easy 
superiority to multitudes of professional men could 
never quite countervail to him this imaginary defect. 
Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards, pass to a 
poor boy for something fine and romantic, which 
they are not; and a free admission to them on an 
equal footing, if it were possible, only once or twice, 
would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him. 

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I 
observe that men run away to other countries, because 
they are not good in their own, and run back to their 
own, because they pass for nothing in the new places. 
For the most part, only the light characters travel. 
Who are you that have no task to keep you at home ? 
I have been quoted as saying captious things about 



90 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

travel ; but I mean to do justice. I thinly there is a 
restlessness in our people, which argues want of 
character. All educated Americans, first or last, go 
to Europe; — perhaps, because it is their mental 
home, as the invalid habits of this country might 
suggest. An eminent teacher of girls said, " the 
idea of a girl's education is, whatever qualifies 
them for going to Europe." Can we never extract 
this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our 
countrymen? One sees very well what their fate 
must be. He that does not fill a place at home, 
cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insig- 
nificance in a larger crowd. You do not think you 
will find anything there which you have not seen at 
home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. 
Do you suppose there is any country where they do 
not scald milkpans, and swaddle the infants, and 
burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is 
true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go 
where he will, he can only find so much beauty or 
worth as he carries. 

Of course, for some men, travel may be useful. 
Naturalists, discoverers, and sailors are born. Some 
men are made for couriers, exchangers, envoys, mis- 
sionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for 
farmers and working-men. And if the man is of a 
light and social turn, and Nature has aimed to make 
a legged and winged creature, framed for locomotion, 
we must follow her hint, and furnish him with that 
breeding which gives currency, as sedulously as with 
that which gives worth. But let us not be pedantic, 
but allow to travel its full effect. The boy grown up 
on the farm, which he has never left, is said in the 
country to have had no chance, and boys and men of 
that condition look upon work on a railroad, or 
drudgery in a city, as opportunity. Poor country 
boys of Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed 
what knowledge they had to their peddling trips to 



CULTURE. 91 

the Southern States. California and the Pacific 
Coast is now the university of this class, as Virginia 
was in old times. "To have some chance" is their 
word. And the phrase " to know the world/' or to 
travel, is synonymous with all men's ideas of advan- 
tage and superiority. No doubt, to a man of sense, 
travel offers advantages. As many languages as he 
has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so 
many times is he a man. A foreign country is a 
point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own. 
One use of travel is, to recommend the books and 
works of home (we go to Europe to be Americanized); 
and another, to find men. For, as Nature has put 
fruits apart in latitudes, a new fruit in every degree, 
so knowledge and fine moral quality she' lodges in 
distant men. And thus, of the six or seven teachers 
whom each man wants among his contemporaries, it 
often happens that one or two of them live on the 
other side of the world. 

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain 
solstice, when the stars stand still in our inward 
firmament, and when there is required some foreign 
force, some diversion or alterative to prevent stag- 
nation. And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one 
of the best. Just as a man witnessing the admirable 
effect of ether to lull pain, and meditating on the 
contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices 
in Dr. Jackson's benign discovery, so a man who 
looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, (i If I 
should be driven from my own home, here, at least, 
my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal 
amusement and occupation which the human race in 
ages could contrive and accumulate." 

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic 
value of railroads is to unite the advantages of town 
and country life, neither of which we can spare. A 
man should live in or near a large town, because, let 
his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as 



92 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, 
and, in a city, the total attraction of all the citizens is 
sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and 
drag the most improbable hermit within its walls 
.some day in the year. In town, he can find the swim- 
ming-school, the gymnasium, the dancing-master, the 
shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama; the 
chemist's shop, the museum of natural history; the 
gallery of fine arts ; the national orators, in their 
turn ; foreign travellers, the libraries, and his club. 
In the country, he can find solitude and reading, 
manly labour, cheap living, and his old shoes; moors 
for game, hills for geology, and groves for devotion. 
Aubrey writes, fe I have heard Thomas Hobbes say, 
that, in the Earl of Devon's house, in Derbyshire, 
there was a good library and books enough for him, 
and his lordship stored the library with what books 
he thought fit to be bought. But the want of good 
conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, 
though he conceived he could order his thinking as 
well as another, yet he found a great defect. In the 
country, in long time, for want of good conversation, 
one's understanding and invention contract a moss on 
them, like an old paling in an orchard." 

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and 
New York take the nonsense out of a man. A great 
part of our education is sympathetic and social. 
Boys and girls who have been brought up with well- 
informed and superior people, show in their manners 
an inestimable grace. Fuller says, that " William, 
Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of 
Spain, every time he put off his hat." You cannot 
have one well-bred man, without a whole society of 
such. They keep each other up to any high point. 
Especially women ; — it requires a great many culti- 
vated women, — saloons of bright, elegant, reading 
women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spec- 
tacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant 



CULTURE. 93 

society,— iii order that you should have one Madame 
de Stael. The head of a commercial house, or a 
leading lawyer or politician, is Drought into daily 
contact with troops of men from all parts of the 
country, and those too the driving-wheels, the business 
men of each section, and one can hardly suggest 
for an apprehensive man a more searching culture. 
Besides, we must remember the high social possi- 
bilities of a million of men. The best bribe which 
London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in 
such a vast variety of people and conditions, one 
can believe there is room for persons of romantic 
character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and 
the hero may hope to confront their counterparts. 

I wish cities could teach their best lesson, — of 
quiet manners. It is the foible especially of American 
youth, — pretension. The mark of the man of the 
world is absence of pretension. He does not make 
a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all 
brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, 
performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his 
fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, 
and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. 
His conversation clings to the weather and the news, 
yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, 
and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. 
How the imagination is piqued by anecdotes of some 
great man passing incognito, as a king in gray 
clothes, — of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his 
glittering levee; of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, 
or Wellington, or Goethe, or any container of tran- 
scendent power, passing for nobody; of Epaminondas, 
"who never says anything, but will listen eternally;" 
of Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and com- 
mon expressions in intercourse with strangers, worse 
rather than better clothes, and to appear a little more 
capricious than he was. There are advantages in 
the old hat and box-coat. I have heard, that, 



94 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

throughout this country, a certain respect is paid to 
good broadcloth ; but dress makes a little restraint : 
men will not commit themselves. But the box-coat 
is like wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say 
what they think. An old poet says, 

" Go far and go sparing, 
For you'll find it certain, 
The poorer and the baser you appear, 
The more you'll look through still."* 

Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the Lay of the 
Humble, 

" To me men are for what they are 
They wear no masks with me." 

? Tis odd that our people should have — not water 
on the brain, — but a little gas there. A shrewd 
foreigner said of the Americans, that, " whatever 
they say has a little the air of a speech." Yet one 
of the traits down in the books as distinguishing the 
Anglo-Saxon, is, a trick of self-disparagement. To 
be sure, in old, dense countries, among a million of 
good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and 
you find humorists. In an English party, a man 
with no marked manners or features, with a face like 
red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit, learning, a 
wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with 
good men in all parts of the world, until you think 
you have fallen upon some illustrious personage. 
Can it be that the American forest has refreshed 
some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die 
out, — the love of the scarlet feather, of beads, and 
tinsel ? The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock 
plumes, and embroidery ; and I remember one rainy 
morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a 
blaze with scarlet umbrellas. The English have a 
plain taste. The equipages of the grandees are plain. 
A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city 

* Beaumont and Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed. 



CULTURE. 95 

wealth. Mr. Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title 
of Mister good against any king in Europe. They 
have piqued themselves on governing the whole 
world in the poor, plain, dark committee-room which 
the House of Commons sat in, before the fire. 

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best 
things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying 
trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop- 
house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of 
grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with 
them, sobriety and elevation. He has come among 
a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, ser- 
vile to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a 
fracas of pitiful cares and disasters. You say the 
gods ought to respect a life whose objects are their 
own ; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud 
of insignificant annoyances : 

" Mirmidons, race feconde, 
Mirmidons, 

Enfin nous commandons ; 
Jupiter livre le monde 
Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons." * 

" 'Tis heavy odds 
Against the gods, 

When they will match with myrmidons. 
"We spawning, spawning myrmidons, 
Our turn to-day ! we take command, 
Jove gives the globe into the hand 
Of myrmidons, of myrmidons." 

What is odious but noise, and people who scream 
and bewail? people whose vane points always east, 
who live to dine, who send for the doctor, who coddle 
themselves, who toast their feet on the register, who 
intrigue to secure a padded chair, and a corner out 
of the draught? Suffer them once to begin the 
enumeration of their infirmities, and the sun will go 
down on the unfinished tale. Let these triflers put 
us out of conceit with petty comforts. To a man at 

* Beranger. 



96 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

work, the frost is but a colour : the rain, the wind, 
he forgot them when he came in. Let us learn to 
live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least 
habit of dominion over the palate has certain good 
effects not easily estimated. Neither will we be 
driven into a quiddling abstemiousness. 'Tis a 
superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made 
at last of the same chemical atoms. 

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. 
How can you mind diet, bed, dress, or salutes, or 
compliments, or the figure you make in company, or 
wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, when 
you think how paltry are the machinery and the 
workers ? Wordsworth was praised to me, in West- 
moreland, for having afforded to his country neigh- 
bours an example of a modest household where 
comfort and culture were secured, without display. 
And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and out- 
grown coat, that he may secure the coveted place in 
college, and the right in the library, is educated to 
some purpose. There is a great deal of self-denial 
and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in 
town and country, that has not got into literature 
and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet ; that 
saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials ; 
that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells 
the horse, but builds the school; works early and 
late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, 
six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the 
paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to 
work again. 

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits 
of cities ; they must be used ; yet cautiously, and 
haughtily, — and will yield their best values to him 
who best can do without them. Keep the town for 
occasions, but the habits should be formed to retire- 
ment. Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to 
genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter 



CULTURE. 97 

where moult the wings which will bear it farther 
than suns and stars. He who should inspire and 
lead his race must he defended from travelling with 
the souls of other men, from living, breathing, read- 
ing, and writing in the daily time-worn yoke of their 
opinions. " In the morning, — solitude," said Pytha- 
goras ; that Nature may speak to the imagination, as 
she does never in company, and that her favourite may 
make acquaintance with those divine strengths which 
disclose themselves to serious and abstracted thought. 
'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, 
Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live 
in a crowd, but descended into it from time to time 
as benefactors; and the wise instructor will press this 
point of securing to the young soul in the disposition 
of time and the arrangements of living, periods and 
habits of solitude. The high advantage of univer- 
sity life, is often the mere mechanical one, I may call 
it, of a separate chamber and fire, — which parents 
will allow the boy without hesitation at Cambridge, 
but do not think needful at home. We say solitude, 
to mark the character of the tone of thought ; but if 
it can be shared between two, or more than two, it is 
happier, and not less noble. "We four," wrote 
Neander to his sacred friends, iC will enjoy at Plalle 
the inward blessedness of a civitas Dei, whose foun- 
dations are for ever friendship. The more I know 
you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my 
wonted companions. Their very presence stupefies 
me. The common understanding withdraws itself 
from the one centre of all existence." 

Solitude takes off the pressure of present impor- 
tunities that more catholic and humane relations may 
appear. The saint and poet seek privacy to ends the 
most public and universal : and it is the secret of cul- 
ture, to interest the man more in his public, than in 
his private quality. Here is a new poem, which 
elicits a good many comments in the journals, and 

7 



98 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to 
eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it ; 
and that is, in the main, unfavourable. The poet, as 
a craftsman, is only interested in the praise accorded 
to him, and not in the censure, though it be just. 
And the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and 
rejects the censure, as proving incapacity in the 
critic. But the poet cultivated becomes a stockholder 
in both companies, — say Mr. Curfew, — in the Cur- 
few stock, and in the humanity stock; and, in the 
last, exults as much in the demonstration of the 
unsoundness of Curfew, as his hiterest in the former 
gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For, 
the depreciation of his Curfew stock only shows the 
immense values of the humanity stock. As soon as 
he sides with his critic against himself, with joy, he 
is a cultivated man. 

We must have an intellectual quality in all pro- 
perty and in all action, or they are nought. I must 
have children, I must have events, I must have a 
social state and history, or my thinking and speaking 
want body or basis. But to give these accessories 
any value, I must know them as contingent and 
rather showy possessions, which pass for more to 
the people than to me. We see this abstraction in 
scholars, as a matter of course : but what a charm it 
adds when observed in practical men, Bonaparte, 
like Csesar, was intellectual, and could look at every 
object for itself, without affection. Though an egotist 
a Voutrance, he could criticize a play, a building, a 
character, on universal grounds, and give a just 
opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in 
politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we 
discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill ; 
as when we learn of Lord Fairfax, the Long Par- 
liament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies ; 
or of the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius 
in mathematics ; or of a living banker, his success in 



CULTURE. 99 

poetry; or of a partisan journalist, his devotion to 
ornithology. So, if in travelling in the dreary wil- 
dernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe 
on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, 
or Calderon, we should wish to hug him. In callings 
that require roughest energy, soldiers, sea-captains, 
and civil engineers sometimes betray a fine insight, if 
only through a certain gentleness when off duty: a 
good-natured admission that there are illusions, — and 
who shall say that he is not their sport ? We only 
vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say, that 
culture opens the sense of beauty. A man is a 
beggar who only lives to the useful, and, however he 
may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, 
cannot be said to have arrived at self-possession. I 
suffer every day, from the want of perception of 
beauty in people. They do not know the charm with 
which all moments and objects can be embellished, 
the charm of manners, of self-command, of benevo- 
lence. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the 
gentleman, — repose in energy. The Greek battle- 
pieces are calm ; the heroes, in whatever violent 
actions engaged, retain a serene aspect ; as we say of 
Niagara, that it falls without speed. A cheerful, 
intelligent face is the end of culture, and success 
enough. For it indicates the purpose of Nature and 
wisdom attained. 

When our higher faculties are in activity, we are 
domesticated, and awkwardness and discomfort give 
place to natural and agreeable movements. It is 
noticed, that the consideration of the great periods 
and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, 
and an indifference to death. The influence of fine 
scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our 
irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a 
high dome, and the expansive interior of a cathedral, 
have a sensible effect on manners. I have heard 
that stiff people lose something of their awkwardness 

, LofG. 



100 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

under high ceilings, and in spacious halls. I think, 
sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us 
manners, and abolish hurry. 

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher 
influx the empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, 
or of trade, and the useful arts. There is a certain 
loftiness of thought and power to marshal and adjust 
particulars, which can only come from an insight of 
their whole connection. The orator who has once 
seen things in their divine order, w T ill never quite 
lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a 
higher ground, and, though he will say nothing of 
philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing 
with them, and an incapableness of being dazzled or 
frighted, which will distinguish his handling from 
that of attorneys and factors. A man who stands on 
a good footing with the heads of parties at Washing- 
ton, reads the rumours of the newspapers, and the 
guesses of provincial politicians, with a key to the 
right and wrong in each statement, and sees well 
enough where all this will end. Archimedes will 
look through your Connecticut machine at a glance, 
and judge of its fitness. And much more, a wise 
man who knows not only what Plato, but what Saint 
John can show him, can easily raise the affair he 
deals with to a certain majesty. Plato says, Pericles 
owed this elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras. 
Burke descended from a higher sphere when he would 
influence human affairs. Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, 
Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which 
the brawls of modern senates are but pot-house 
politics. 

But there are higher secrets of culture, which 
are not for the apprentices, but for proficients. These 
are lessons only for the brave. We must know our 
friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our 
friends. Ben Jonson specifies in his Address to the 
Muse : — 



CULTURE. 101 

" Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill-will, 
And, reconciled, keep him suspected still, 
Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse, 
Almost all ways to any better course ; 
With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee, 
And. which thou brought'st me, blessed Poverty." 

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at 
heroism. But the wiser God says, Take the shame, 
the poverty, and the penal solitude, that belong to 
truth-speaking. Try the rough water as well as the 
smooth. Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. 
When the state is unquiet, personal qualities are 
more than ever decisive. Fear not a revolution which 
will constrain you to live five years in one. Don't be 
so tender at making an enemy now and then. Be will- 
ing to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the popu- 
lace bestow on you their coldest contempts. The 
finished man of the world must eat of every apple 
once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, 
and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor 
enemies, but values men only as channels of power. 

He who aims high, must dread an easy home and 
popular manners. Heaven sometimes hedges a rare 
character about with ungainliness and odium, as the 
burr that protects the fruit. If there is any great 
and good thing in store for you, it will not come at 
the first or the second call, nor in the shape of fashion, 
ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for 
dolls. " Steep and craggy," said Porphyry, " is the 
path of the gods." Open your Marcus Antoninus. 
In the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man 
who scorned to shine, and who contested the frowns 
of fortune. They preferred the noble vessel too late 
for the tide, contending with winds and waves, dis- 
mantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into 
harbour with colours flying and guns firing. There 
is none of the social goods that may not be purchased 
too dear, and mere amiableness must not take rank 
with high aims and self-subsistency. 



102 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

Bettine replies to Goethe's mother, who chides her 
disregard of dress, " If I cannot do as I have a 
mind, in our poor Frankfort, I shall not carry things 
far." And the youth must rate at its true mark the 
inconceivable levity of local opinion. The longer we 
live, the more we must endure the elementary ex- 
istence of men and women ; and every brave heart 
must treat society as a child, and never allow it to 
dictate. 

" All that class of the severe and restrictive 
virtues," said Burke, " are almost too costly for 
humanity." Who wishes to be severe? Who 
wishes to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of 
the poor, and low, and impolite ? and who that dares 
do it, can keep his temper sweet, his frolic spirits? 
The high virtues are not debonnaire, but have their 
redress in being illustrious at last. What forests of 
laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those 
who stood firm against the opinion of their contem- 
poraries ! The measure of a master is his success in 
bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years 
later. 

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too 
early. In talking with scholars, I observe that they 
lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood 
which alone could give imaginative literature a 
religious and infinite quality in their esteem. I find, 
too, that the chance for appreciation is much increased 
by being the son of an appreciate, and that these 
boys who now grow up are caught not only years too 
late, but two or three births too late, to make the 
best scholars of. And I think it a presentable motive 
to a scholar, that, as, in an old community, a well- 
born proprietor is usually found, after the first heats 
of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel a 
habitual desire that the estate shall suffer no harm 
by his administration, but shall be delivered down to 
the next heir in as good condition as he received it; — 



CULTURE. 103 

so, a considerate man will reckon himself a subject of 
that secular melioration by which mankind is mol- 
lified, cured, and refined, and will shun every ex- 
penditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will 
jeopardize this social and secular accumulation. 

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with 
rudimental forms, and rose to the more complex, as 
fast as the earth was fit for their dwelling-place ; and 
that the lower perish, as the higher appear. Yery 
few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. 
We still carry sticking to us some remains of the 
preceding inferior quadruped organization. We call 
these millions men ; but they are not yet men. Half 
engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs 
all the music that can be brought to disengage him. 
If Love, red Love, with tears and joy ; if Want with 
his scourge ; if War with his cannonade ; if Chris- 
tianity with its charity ; if Trade with its money ; 
if Art with its portfolios ; if Science with her tele- 
graphs through the deeps of space and time ; can set 
his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on the 
tough chrysalis can break its walls, and let the new 
creature emerge erect and free, — make way, and sing 
psean ! The age of the quadruped is to go out, — the 
age of the brain and of the heart is to come in. The 
time will come when the evil forms we have known 
can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare 
nothing, wants all the material. He is to convert all 
impediments into instruments, all enemies into power. 
The formidable mischief will only make the more 
useful slave. And if one shall read the future of the 
race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount 
and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the 
Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that 
there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, 
until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and 
gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, 
and the hells into benefit. 



104 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 



V.-BEHAVIOUE. 

Grace, Beauty, and Caprice 

Build this golden portal; 

Graceful women, chosen men 

Dazzle every mortal: 

Their sweet and lofty countenance 

His enchanting food; 

He need not go to them, their forms 

Beset his solitude. 

He looketh seldom in their face, 

His eyes explore the ground, 

The green grass is a looking-glass 

Whereon their traits are found. 

Little he says to them, 

So dances his heart in his "breast, 

Their tranquil mien bereaveth him 

Of wit, of words, of rest. 

Too weak to win, too fond to shun 

The tyrants of his doom, 

The much deceived Endymion 

Slips behind a tomb. 

The soul which animates Nature is not less signifi- 
cantly published in the figure, movement, and gesture 
of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle of articu- 
late speech. This silent and subtile language is 
Manners ; not ivhat, but how. Life expresses. A 
statue has no tongue, and needs none. Good tableaux 
do not need declamation. Nature tells every secret 
once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by 
form, attitude, gesture, mien, face, and parts of the 
face, and by the whole action of the machine. The 
visible carriage or action of the individual, as result' 
ing from his organization and his will combined, we 
call manners. What are they but thought entering 
the hands and feet, controlling the movements of the 
body, the speech and behaviour ? 

There is always a best way of doing everything, if 
it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways 
of doing things ; each once a stroke of genius or of 



BEHAVIOUR. 105 

love — now repeated and hardened into usage. They 
form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of 
life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are 
superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a 
depth to the morning meadows. Manners are very 
communicable: men catch them from each other. 
Consuelo, in the romance, boasts of the lessons she 
had given the nobles in manners, on the stage ; and, 
in real life, Talma taught Napoleon the arts of beha- 
viour. Genius invents fine manners, which the baron 
and the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advan- 
tage of a palace, better the instruction. They 
stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode. 

The power of manners is incessant — an element as 
unconcealable as fire. The nobility cannot in any 
country be disguised, and no more in a republic or a 
democracy, than in a kingdom. No man can resist 
their influence. There are certain manners which 
are learned in good society, of that force, that, if a 
person have them, he or she must be considered, and 
is everywhere welcome, though without beauty, or 
wealth, or genius. Give a boy address and accom- 
plishments, and you give him the mastery of palaces 
and fortunes where he goes. He has not the trouble 
of earning or owning them : they solicit him to enter 
and possess. We send girls of a timid, retreating 
disposition to the boarding-school, to the riding- 
school, to the ballroom, or wheresoever they can 
come into acquaintance and nearness of leading per- 
sons of their own sex; where they might learn 
address, and see it near at hand. The power of a 
woman of fashion to lead, and also to daunt and 
repel, derives from their belief that she knows re- 
sources and behaviours not known to them ; but when 
these have mastered her secret, they learn to con- 
front her, and recover their self-possession. 

Every day bears witness to their gentle rule. 
People who would obtrude, now do not obtrude. 



106 CONDUCT OE LIFE, 

The mediocre circle learns to demand that which be- 
longs to a high state of nature or of culture. Your 
manners are always under examination, and by com- 
mittees little suspected — a police in citizens' clothes 
— but are awarding or denying you very high prizes 
when you least think of it. 

We talk much of utilities — but 'tis our manners 
that associate us. In hours of business we go to him 
who knows, or has, or does this or that which we 
want, and we do not let our taste or feeling stand in 
the way. But this activity over, we return to the 
indolent state, and wish for those we can be at ease 
with ; those who will go where we go, whose man- 
ners do not offend us, whose social tone chimes with 
ours. When we reflect on their persuasive and 
cheering force ; how they recommend, prepare, and 
draw people together; how, in all clubs, manners 
make the members ; how manners make the fortune 
of the ambitious youth ; that, for the most part, his 
manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries 
manners ; when we think what keys they are, and to 
what secrets ; what high lessons and inspiring tokens 
of character they convey ; and what divination is 
required in us, for the reading of this fine telegraph, 
we see what range the subject has, and what relations 
to convenience, power, and beauty. 

Their first service is very low — when they are the 
minor morals : but 'tis the beginning of civility — to 
make us, I mean, endurable to each other. We prize 
them for their rough-plastic, abstergent force ; to get 
people out of the quadruped state; to get them 
washed, clothed, and set up on end ; to slough their 
animal husks and habits ; compel them to be clean ; 
overawe their spite and meanness, teach them to stifle 
the base, and choose the generous expression, and 
make them know how much happier the generous 
behaviours are. 

Bad behaviour the laws cannot reach. Society is 



BEHAVIOUR. 107 

infested with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous 
persons who prey upon the rest, and whom a public 
opinion concentrated into good manners, forms ac- 
cepted by the sense of all, can reach : the contra- 
dictors and railers at public and private tables, who 
are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of 
honour to growl at any passer-by, and do the honours 
of the house by barking him out of sight : I have 
seen men who neigh like a horse when you contradict 
them, or say something which they do not under- 
stand; then the overbold, who make their own in- 
vitation to your hearth ; the persevering talker, who 
gives you his society in large, saturating doses ; the 
pitiers of themselves — a perilous class ; the frivolous 
Asmodeus, who relies on you to find him in ropes of 
sand to twist ; the monotones ; in short, every stripe 
of absurdity ; these are social inflictions which the 
magistrate cannot cure or defend you from, and 
which must be intrusted to the restraining force of 
custom, and proverbs, and familiar rules of behaviour 
impressed on young people in their school-days. 

In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi, they 
print, or used to print, among the rules of the house, 
that ff no gentleman can be permitted to come to the 
public table without his coat ; " and in the same 
country, in the pews of the churches, little placards 
plead with the worshipper against the fury of expec- 
toration. Charles Dickens self-sacrificingly under- 
took the reformation of our American manners in 
unspeakable particulars. I think the lesson was not 
quite lost ; that it held bad manners up, so that the 
churls could see the deformity. Unhappily, the book 
had its own deformities. It ought not to need to 
print in a reading-room a caution to strangers not to 
speak loud ; nor to persons who look over fine 
engravings, that they should be handled like cob- 
webs and butterflies' wings ; nor to persons who look 
at marble statues, that they shall not smite them with 



108 CONDUCT OE LIFE, 

canes. But even in the perfect civilization of this 
city, such cautions are not quite needless in the 
Athenaeum and City Library. 

Manners are factitious, and grow out of circum- 
stance as well as out of character. If you look at 
the pictures of patricians and of peasants, of different 
periods and countries, you will see how well they 
match the same classes in our towns. The modern 
aristocrat not only is well drawn in Titian's Venetian 
doges, and in Roman coins and statues, but also in 
the pictures which Commodore Perry brought home 
of dignitaries in Japan. Broad lands and great 
interests not only arrive to such heads as can 
manage them, but form manners of power. A keen 
eye, too, will see nice gradations of rank, or see in 
the manners the degree of homage the party is wont 
to receive. A prince who is accustomed every day 
to be courted and deferred to by the highest 
grandees, acquires a corresponding expectation and 
a becoming mode of receiving and replying to this 
homage. 

There are always exceptional people and modes. 
English grandees affect to be farmers. Claverhouse 
is a fop, and, under the finish of dress and levity of 
behaviour, hides the terror of his war. But Nature 
and Destiny are honest, and never fail to leave their 
mark, to hang out a sign for each and for every 
quality. It is much to conquer one's face, and per- 
haps the ambitious youth thinks he has got the 
whole secret when he has learned that disengaged 
manners are commanding. Don't be deceived by a 
facile exterior. Tender men sometimes have strong 
wills. We had, in Massachusetts, an old statesman, 
who had sat all his life in courts and in chairs of 
state, without overcoming an extreme irritability of 
face, voice, and bearing : when he spoke, his voice 
would not serve him ; it cracked, it broke, it wheezed, 
it piped ; — little cared he ; he knew that it had got to 



BEHAVIOUE. 109 

pipe, or wheeze* or screech his argument and his in- 
dignation. When he sat down, after speaking, he 
seemed in a sort of fit, and held on to his chair with 
both hands : but underneath all this irritability was 
a puissant will, firm, and advancing, and a memory 
in which lay in order and method like geologic strata 
every fact of his history, and under the control of 
his will. 

Manners are partly factitious, but, mainly, there 
must be capacity for culture in the blood. Else all 
culture is vain. The obstinate prejudice in favour 
of blood, which lies at the base of the feudal and 
monarchical fabrics of the Old World, has some reason 
in common experience. Every man — mathematician, 
artist, soldier, or merchant — looks with confidence 
for some traits and talents in his own child, which he 
would not dare to presume in the child of a stranger. 
The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point. 
u Take a thorn-bush," said the Emir Abd-el-Kader, 
"and sprinkle at for a whole year with water; — it 
will yield nothing but thorns. Take a date-tree, 
leave it without culture, and it will always produce 
dates. Nobility is the date-tree, and the Arab popu- 
lace is a bush of thorns." 

A main fact in the history of manners is the won- 
derful expressiveness of the human body. If it 
were made of glass, or of air, and the thoughts were 
written on steel tablets within, it could not publish 
more truly its meaning than now, Wise men 
read very sharply all your private history in your 
look and gait and behaviour. The whole economy 
of nature is bent on expression. The tell-tale body 
is all tongues. Men are like Geneva watches with 
crystal faces, which expose the whole movement. 
They carry the liquor of life flowing up and down 
in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the 
curious how it is with them. The face and eyes 
reveal what the spirit is doing, how old it is, what 



110 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

aims it has. The eyes indicate the antiquity of the 
soul, or through how many forms it has already 
ascended. It almost violates the proprieties, if we 
say above the breath here what the confessing 
eyes do not hesitate to utter to every street pas- 
senger. 

Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far 
seems imperfect. In Siberia a late traveller found 
men who could see the satellites of Jupiter with 
their unarmed eye. In some respects the animals 
excel us. The birds have a longer sight, beside the 
advantage by their wings of a higher observatory. 
A cow can bid her calf, by secret signal, probably, 
of the eye, to run away, or to lie clown and hide 
itself. The jockeys say of certain horses, that " they 
look over the whole ground." The out-door life, 
and hunting, and labour, give equal vigour to the 
human eye. A farmer looks out at you as strong as 
the horse ; his eye-beam is like the stroke of a staff. 
An eye can threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, 
or can insult like hissing or kicking ; or, in its altered 
mood, by beams of kindness, it can make the heart 
dance with joy. 

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind. 
When a thought strikes us, the eyes fix, and remain 
gazing at a distance ; in enumerating the names of 
persons or of countries, as France, Germany, Spain, 
Turkey, the eyes wink at each new name. There is 
no nicety of learning sought by the mind, which the 
eyes do not vie in acquiring. "An artist," said 
Michel Angelo, " must have his measuring tools not 
in the hand but in the eye ; " and there is no end to 
the catalogue of its performances, whether in indolent 
vision (that of health and beauty), or in strained 
vision (that of art and labour). 

Eyes are bold as lions — roving, running, leaping, 
here and there, far and near. They speak all lan- 
guages. They wait for no introduction : they are 



BEHAVIOUK. Ill 

no Englishmen ; ask no leave of age or rank ; they 
respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning 
nor power, nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and 
come again, and go through and through you, in 
a moment of time. What inundation of life and 
thought is discharged from one soul into another, 
through them ! The glance is natural magic. The 
mysterious communication established across a house 
between two entire strangers, moves all the springs 
of wonder. The communication by the glance is in 
the greatest part not subject to the control of the 
will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature. 
We look into the eyes to know if this other form is 
another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a 
faithful confession what inhabitant is there. The 
revelations are sometimes terrific. The confession of 
a low, usurping devil is there made, and the observer 
shall seem to feel the stirring of owls, and bats, and 
horned hoofs, where he looked for innocence and 
simplicity. 'Tis remarkable, too, that the spirit that 
appears at the windows of the house does at once 
invest himself in a new form of his own to the mind 
of the beholder. 

The eyes of men converse as much as their 
tongues, with the advantage that the ocular dialect 
needs no dictionary, but is understood all the world 
over. When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue 
another, a practised man relies on the language of 
the first. If the man is off his centre, the. eyes show , 
it. You can read in the eyes of your companion 
whether your argument hits him, though his tongue 
will not confess it. There is a look by which a man 
shows he is going to say a good thing, and a look 
when he has said it. Yain and forgotten are all the 
fine offers and offices of hospitality, if there is no 
holiday in the eye. How many furtive inclinations 
avowed by the eye, though dissembled by the lips ! 
One comes away from a company in which, it may 



112 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

easily happen, lie has said nothing, and no important 
remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if in 
sympathy with the society, he shall not have a sense 
of this fact, such a stream of life has been flowing 
into him, and out from him, through the eyes. 
There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admis- 
sion into the man than blueberries. Others are 
liquid and deep — wells that a man might fall into ; 
others are aggressive and devouring, seem to call out 
the police, take all too much notice, and require 
crowded Broadways, and the security of millions, to 
protect individuals against them. The military eye 
I meet, now darkly sparkling under clerical, now 
under rustic brows. 'Tis the city of Lacedsemon ; 
'tis a stack of bayonets. There are asking eyes, 
asserting eyes, prowling eyes, and eyes full of fate — 
some of good, and some of sinister omen. The 
alleged power to charm down insanity, or ferocity in 
beasts, is a power behind the eye. It must be a 
victory achieved in the will, before it can be sig- 
nified in the eye. 'Tis very certain that each man 
carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in 
the immense scale of men, and we are always learn- 
ing to read it. A complete man should need no 
auxiliaries to his personal presence. Whoever looked 
on him would consent to his will, being certified that 
his aims were generous and universal. The reason 
why men do not obey us is because they see the mud 
at the bottom of our eye. 

If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, 
the other features have their own. A man finds 
room in the few square inches of the face for the 
traits of all his ancestors ; for the expression of 
all his history, and his wants. The sculptor, and 
Winckelmann, and Lavater, will tell you how signi- 
ficant a feature is the nose ; how its forms express 
strength or weakness of will, and good or bad temper. 
The nose of Julius Cassar, of Dante, and of Pitt, 



BEHAVIOUK. 113 

suggest " the terrors of the beak." What refinement, 
and what limitations, the teeth betray ! " Beware 
you don't laugh," said the wise mother, " for then 
you show all your faults." 

Balzac left in manuscript a chapter, which he 
called (i Theorie de la demarche" in which he says : 
" The look, the voice, the respiration, and the atti- 
tude or walk, are identical. But, as it has not been 
given to man, the power to stand guard, at once, 
over these four different simultaneous expressions of 
his thought, watch that one which speaks out the 
truth, and you will know the whole man." 

Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of 
manners, which, in the idle and expensive society 
dwelling in them, are raised to a high art. The 
maxim of courts is, that manner is power. A calm 
and resolute bearing, a polished speech, an embel- 
lishment of trifles, and the art of hiding all uncom- 
fortable feeling, are essential to the courtier : and 
Saint Simon, and Cardinal de Retz, and Rcederer, 
and an encyclopaedia of Memoires, will instruct you, 
if you wish, in those potent secrets. Thus, it is a 
point of pride with kings to remember faces and 
names. It is reported of one prince, that his head 
had the air of leaning downwards, in order not to 
humble the crowd. There are people who come in 
ever like a child with a piece of good news. It 
was said of the late Lord Holland, that he always 
came down to breakfast with the air of a man who 
had just met with some signal good-fortune. In 
" Notre Dame" the grandee took his place on the 
dais, with the look of one who is thinking of some- 
thing else. But we must not peep and eavesdrop at 
palace-doors. 

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in 
others. A scholar may be a well-bred man, or he 
may not. The enthusiast is introduced to polished 
scholars in societv, and is chilled and silenced by 

8 



114 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

finding himself not in their element. They all have 
somewhat which he has not, and, it seems, ought to 
have. But if he finds a scholar apart from his com- 
panions, it is then the enthusiast's turn, and the 
scholar has no defence, hut must deal on his terms. 
Now they must fight the battle out on their private 
strengths. "What is the talent of that character so 
common — the successful man of the world — in all 
marts, senates, and drawing-rooms ? Manners : 
manners of power; sense to see his advantage, and 
manners up to it. See him approach his man. He 
knows that troops behave as they are handled at 
first ; — that is his cheap secret ; just what happens to 
every two persons who meet on any affair, — one 
instantly perceives that he has the key of the situa- 
tion, that his will comprehends the other's will, as the 
cat does the mouse ; and he has only to use courtesy, 
and furnish good-natured reasons to his victim to 
cover up the chain, lest he be shamed into resistance. 
The theatre in which this science of manners has 
a formal importance is not with us a court, but dress- 
circles, wherein, after the close of the day's business, 
men and women meet at leisure, for mutual enter- 
tainment, hi ornamented drawing-rooms. Of course, 
it has every variety of attraction and merit ; but, to 
earnest persons, to youths or maidens who have great 
objects at heart, we cannot extol it highly. A well- 
dressed, talkative company, where each is bent to 
amuse the other — yet the high-born Turk who came 
hither fancied that every woman seemed to be suffer- 
ing for a chair ; that all the talkers were brained and 
exhausted by the deoxygenated air: it spoiled the 
best persons : it put all on stilts. Yet here are the 
secret biographies written and read. The aspect of 
that man is repulsive ; 1 do not wish to deal with 
him. The other is irritable, shy, and on his guard. 
The youth looks humble and manly : I choose him. 
Look on this woman. There is not beauty, nor 



BEHAVIOUK. 115 

brilliant sayings, nor distinguished power to serve 
you; but all see her gladly; her whole air and im- 
pression are healthful. Here come the sentimentalists, 
and the invalids. Here is Elise, who caught cold in 
coming into the world, and has always increased it 
since. Here are creep-mouse manners ; and thievish 
manners. " Look at Northcote," said Fuseli ; " he 
looks like a rat that has seen a cat." In the shallow 
company, easily excited, easily tired, here is the 
columnar Bernard : the Alleghanies do not express 
more repose than his behaviour. Here are the sweet 
following eyes of Cecile: it seemed always that she 
demanded the heart. Nothing can be more excellent 
in kind than the Corinthian grace of Gertrude's 
manners, and yet Blanche, who has no manners, has 
better manners than she; for the movements of 
Blanche are the sallies of a spirit which is sufficient 
for the moment, and she can afford to express every 
thought by instant action. 

Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to 
be a contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a 
distance. Fashion is shrewd to detect those who 
do not belong to her train, and seldom wastes her 
attentions. Society is very swift in its instincts, and, 
if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you ; 
or quietly drops you. The first weapon enrages the 
party attacked ; the second is still more effective, but 
is not to be resisted, as the date of the transaction is 
not easily found. People grow up and grow old 
under this infliction, and never suspect the truth, 
ascribing the solitude which acts on them very 
injuriously to any cause but the right one. 

The basis of good manners is self-reliance. Ne- 
cessity is the law of all who are not self-possessed. 
Those who are not self-possessed, obtrude, and pain 
us. Some men appear to feel that they belong to a 
Pariah caste. They fear to offend, they bend and 
apologize, and walk through life with a timid step. 



116 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

As we sometimes dream that we are in a well-dressed 
company without any coat, so Godfrey acts ever as 
if he suffered from some mortifying circumstance. 
The hero should find himself at home, wherever he 
is ; should impart comfort by his own security and 
good-nature to all beholders. The hero is suffered to 
be himself. A person of strong mind comes to per- 
ceive that for him an immunity is secured so long as 
he renders to society that service which is native and 
proper to him — an immunity from all the observances, 
yea, and duties, which society so tyrannically imposes 
on the rank and file of its members. " Euripides," 
says Aspasia, " has not the fine manners of Sophocles ; 
but," she adds good-hum ouredly, " the movers and 
masters of our souls have surely a right to throw out 
their limbs as carelessly as they please, on the world 
that belongs to them, and before the creatures they 
have animated." * 

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar 
than haste. Friendship should be surrounded with 
ceremonies and respects, and not crushed into cor- 
ners. Friendship requires more time than poor busy 
men can usually command. Here comes to me, 
Roland, with a delicacy of sentiment leading and in- 
wrapping him like a divine cloud or holy ghost. 'Tis 
a great destitution to both that this should not be 
entertained with large leisures, but contrariwise 
should be balked by importunate affairs. 

But through this lustrous varnish, the reality is 
ever shining. 'Tis hard to keep the what from break- 
ing through this pretty painting of the how. The 
core will come to the surface. Strong will and keen 
perception overpower old manners, and create new ; 
and the thought of the present moment has a greater 
value than all the past. In persons of character, we 
do not remark manners, because of their instanta- 
neousness. We are surprised by the thing done, out 

* Landor: Pericles and Aspasia. 



BEHAVIOUK. 117 

of all power to watch tlie way of it. Yet nothing is 
more charming than to recognize the great style which 
runs through the actions of such. People masquerade 
before us in their fortunes, titles, offices, and con- 
nections, as academic or civil presidents, or senators, 
or professors, or great lawyers, and impose on the 
frivolous, and a good deal on each other, by these 
fames. At least, it is a point of prudent good man- 
ners to treat these reputations tenderly, as if they 
were merited. But the sad realist knows these fellows 
at a glance, and they know him ; as when in Paris 
the chief of the police enters a ballroom, so many 
diamonded pretenders shrink and make themselves as 
inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating 
look as they pass. is I had received," said a sibyl, 
" I had received at birth the fatal gift of penetration" 
— and these Cassandras are always born. 

Manners impress as they indicate real power. A 
man who is sure of his point, carries a broad and 
contented expression, which everybody reads. And 
you cannot rightly train one to an air and manner, 
except by making him the kind of man of whom that 
manner is the natural expression. Nature for ever 
puts a premium on reality. What is done for effect, 
is seen to be done for effect ; what is done for love, is 
felt to be done for love. A man inspires affection 
and honour, because he was not lying in wait for 
these. The things of a man for which we visit him, 
were done in the dark and the cold. A little integrity 
is better than any career. So deep are the sources of 
this surface-action, that even the size of your com- 
panion seems to vary with his freedom of thought. 
Not only is he larger, when at ease, and his thoughts 
gerierous, but everything around him becomes varia- 
ble with expression. No carpenter's rule, no rod and 
chain, will measure the dimensions of any house or 
house-lot: go into the house: if the proprietor is 
constrained and deferring, 'tis of no importance how 



118 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

large his house., how beautiful his grounds — you 
quickly come to the end of all: but if the man is 
self-possessed, happy, and at home, his house is deep- 
founded, indefinitely large and. interesting, the roof 
and dome buoyant as the sky. Under the humblest 
roof, the commonest person in plain clothes sits there 
massive, cheerful, yet formidable, like the Egyptian 
colossi. 

Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor 
Champollion has set down the grammar-rules of this 
dialect, older than Sanscrit ; but they who cannot yet 
read English, can read this. Men take each other's 
measure when they meet for the first time — and 
every time they meet. How do they get this rapid 
knowledge, even before they speak, of each other's 
power and dispositions ? One would say, that the 
persuasion of their speech is not in what they say — 
or, that men do not convince by their argument — but 
by their personality, by who they are, and what they 
said and did heretofore. A man already strong is 
listened to, and everything he says is applauded. 
Another opposes him with sound argument, but the 
argument is scouted, until by and by it gets into the 
mind of some weighty person ; then it begins to tell 
on the community. 

Self-reliance is the basis of behaviour, as it is the 
guaranty that the powers are not squandered in too 
much demonstration. In this country, where school 
education is universal, we have a superficial culture, 
and a profusion of reading and writing and expres- 
sion. We parade our nobilities in poems and 
orations, instead of working them up into happiness. 
There is a whisper out of the ages to him who can 
understand it, — " whatever is known to thyself alone, 
has always very great value." There is some reason 
to believe, that, when a man does not write his 
poetry, it escapes by other vents through him, 
instead of the one vent of writing ; clings to his 



BEHAVIOUE. 119 

form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing 
poetical about them except their verses. Jacobi said, 
that te when a man has fully expressed his thought, 
he has somewhat less possession of it." One would 
say, the rule is, — What a man is irresistibly urged 
to say, helps him and us. In explaining his thought 
to others, he explains it to himself: but when he 
opens it for show, it corrupts him. 

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; 
novels are their literature. Novels are the journal 
or record of manners ; and the new importance of 
these books derives from the fact, that the novelist 
begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part 
of life more worthily. The novels used to be all 
alike, and had a quite vulgar tone. The novels 
used to lead us on to a foolish interest in the 
fortunes of the boy and girl they described. The 
boy was to be raised from a humble to a high 
position. He was in want of a wife and a castle, 
and the object of the story was to supply him with 
one or both. We watched sympathetically, step by 
step, his climbing, until, at last, the point is gained, 
the wedding-day is fixed, and we follow the gala 
procession home to the castle, when the doors are 
slammed in our face, and the poor reader is left 
outside in the cold, not enriched by so much as an 
idea, or a virtuous impulse. 

But the victories of character are instant, and 
victories for all. Its greatness enlarges all. We are 
fortified by every heroic anecdote. The novels are 
as useful as Bibles, if they teach you the secret, that 
the best of life is conversation, and the greatest 
success is confidence, or perfect understanding be- 
tween sincere people. 5 Tis a French definition of 
friendship, rien que £ entendre, good understanding. 
The highest compact we can make with our fellow, 
is, — " Let there be truth between us two for ever- 
more," That is the charm in all good novels, as 



120 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

it is the charm in all good histories, that the heroes 
mutually understand, from the first, and deal loyally, 
and with a profound trust in each other. It is 
sublime to feel and say of another, " I need never 
meet, or speak, or write to him : we need not rein- 
force ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance : I 
rely on him as on myself: if he did thus or thus, 
I know it was right." 

In all the superior people I have met, I notice 
directness, truth spoken more truly, as if everything 
of obstruction, of malformation, had been trained 
away. What have they to conceal? What have 
they to exhibit ? Between simple and noble persons, 
there is always a quick intelligence : they recognize 
at sight, and meet on a better ground than the talents 
and skills they may chance to possess, namely, on 
sincerity and uprightness. For, it is not what talents 
or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, 
that constitutes friendship and character. The man 
that stands by himself, the universe stands by him 
also. It is related of the monk Basle, that, being 
excommunicated by the Pope, he was, at his death, 
sent in charge of an angel to find a fit place of 
suffering in hell ; but, such was the eloquence and 
good-humour of the monk, that, wherever he went 
he was received gladly, and civilly treated, even by 
the most uncivil angels : and, when he came to 
discourse with them, instead of contradicting or 
forcing him, they took his part, and adopted his 
manners : and even good angels came from far, to see 
him, and take up their abode with him. The angel 
that was sent to find a place of torment for him, 
attempted to remove him to a worse pit, but with 
no better success ; for such was the contented spirit 
of the monk, that he found something to praise in 
every place and company, though in hell, and made 
a kind of heaven of it. At last the escorting angel 
returned with his prisoner to them that sent him, 



BEHAVIOUR. 121 

saying, that no phlegethon could be found that would 
burn him ; for that, in whatever condition, Basle 
remained incorrigibly Basle. The legend says, his 
sentence was remitted, and he was allowed to go into 
heaven, and was canonized as a saint. 

There is a stroke of magnanimity in the corre- 
spondence of Bonaparte with his brother Joseph, 
when the latter was King of Spain, and complained 
that he missed in Napoleon's letters the affectionate 
tone which had marked their childish correspondence. 
" I am sorry," replies Napoleon, i( you think you 
shall find your brother again only in the Elysian 
Fields. It is natural, that at forty, he should not 
feel towards you as he did at twelve. But his feel- 
ings towards you have greater truth and strength. 
His friendship has the features of his mind." 

How much we forgive to those who yield us the 
rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon 
them the want of books, of arts, and even of the 
gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember 
them ! Here is a lesson which I brought along with 
me in boyhood from the Latin School, and which 
ranks with the best of Roman anecdotes. Marcus 
Scaur us was accused by Quintus Yarius Hispanus, 
that he had excited the allies to take arms against the 
Republic. But he, full of firmness and gravity, 
defended himself in this manner : " Quintus Yarius 
Hispanus alleges that Marcus Scaur us, President of 
the Senate, excited the allies to arms : Marcus 
Scaurus, President of the Senate, denies it. There 
is no witness. Which do you believe, Romans ? " 
" Utri creditis, Quirites f " When he had said these 
words, he was absolved by the assembly of the 
people. 

I have seen manners that make a similar impression 
with personal beauty; that give the like exhilara- 
• tion, and refine us like that ; and, in memorable expe- 
riences, they are suddenly better than beauty, and 



122 CONDUCT OF LIEE. 

make that superfluous aud ugly. But they must be 
marked by fine perception, the acquaintance with real 
beauty. They must always show self-control : you 
shall not be facile, apologetic, or leaky, but king over 
your word ; and every gesture and action shall indi- 
cate power at rest. Then they must be inspired by 
the good heart. There is no beautifier of com- 
plexion, or form, or behaviour, like the wish to 
scatter joy and not pain around us. 'Tis good to give 
a stranger a meal, or a night's lodging. 'Tis better 
to be hospitable to his good meaning and thought, 
and give courage to a companion. We must be as 
courteous to a man as we are to a picture, which we 
are willing to give the advantage of a good light. 
Special precepts are not to be thought of : the talent 
of well-doing contains them all. Every hour will 
show a duty as paramount as that of my whim just 
now ; and yet I will write it — that there is one topic 
peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational 
mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not 
slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, 
or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder- stroke, I beseech 
you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute 
the morning, to which all the housemates bring serene 
and pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans. 
Come out of the azure. Love the day. Do not 
leave the sky out of your landscape. The oldest and 
the most deserving person should come very modestly 
into any newly awakened company, respecting the 
divine communications, out of which all must be 
presumed to have newly come. An old man who 
added an elevating culture to a large experience of life, 
said to me, " When you come into the room, I think 
I will study how to make humanity beautiful to you." 
As respects the delicate question of culture, I do 
not think that any other than negative rules can be 
laid down. For positive rules, for suggestion, 
Nature alone inspires it. Who dare assume to guide 



WOESHIP. 123 

a youth, a maid, to perfect manners? — the golden 
mean is so delicate, difficult — say frankly, unattain- 
able. What finest hands would not be clumsy to 
sketch the genial precepts of the young girl's de- 
meanour? The chances seem infinite against suc- 
cess ; and yet success is continually attained. There 
must not be secondariness, and 'tis a thousand to one 
that her air and manner will at once betray that she 
is not primary, but that there is some other one or 
many of her class, to whom she habitually postpones 
herself. But Nature lifts her easily, and without 
knowing it, over these impossibilities, and we are 
continually surprised with graces and felicities not 
only unteachable, but undescribable. 



YL'-WOESHIP. 

This is he, who, felled by foes, 

Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows : 

He to captivity was sold, 

But him no prison-bars would hold : 

Though they sealed him in a rock, 

Mountain chains he can unlock : 

Thrown to lions for their meat, 

The crouching lion kissed his feet : 

Bound to the stake, no flames appalled, 

But arched o'er him an honouring vault. 

This is he men miscall Fate, 

Threading dark ways, arriving late, 

But ever coming in time to crown 

The truth, and hurl wrongdoers down. 

He is the oldest, and best known, f 

More near than aught thou call'st thy own, 

Yet, greeted in another's eyes, 

Disconcerts with glad surprise. 

This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers, 

Floods with blessings unawares. 

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line, 

Severing rightly his from thine, 

Which is human, which divine. 

Some of my friends have complained, when the 
preceding papers were read, that we discussed Fate, 



124 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

Power, and Wealth, on too low a platform; gave 
too much line to the evil spirit of the times; too 
many cakes to Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth's 
risk of making, by excess of candour, the argument 
of atheism so strong, that he could not answer it. 
I have no fears of being forced in my own despite 
to play, as we say, the devil's attorney. I have no 
infirmity of faith ; no belief that it is of much im- 
portance what I or any man may say : I am sure 
that a certain truth will be said through me, though 
I should be dumb, or though I should try to say 
the reverse. Nor do I fear scepticism for any good 
soul. A just thinker will allow full swing to his 
scepticism. I clip my pen in the blackest ink, be- 
cause I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot. 
I have no sympathy with a poor man I knew, who, 
when suicides abounded, told me he dared not look 
at his razor. We are of different opinions at different 
hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on 
the side of truth, 

I see not why we should give ourselves such 
sanctified airs. If the Divine Providence has hid 
from men neither disease, nor deformity, nor cor- 
rupt society, but has stated itself out in passions, in 
war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, 
in hunger and need, in tyrannies, literatures, and 
arts, — let us not be so nice that we cannot write 
these facts down coarsely as they stand, or doubt 
but there is a counter-statement as ponderous, which 
we can arrive at, and which, being put, will make 
all square. The solar system has no anxiety about 
its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty 
is as safe; nor have I any fear that a sceptical 
bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of 
fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doc- 
trine of Faith cannot down-weigh. The strength 
of that principle is not measured in ounces and 
pounds : it tyrannizes at the centre of Nature. We 



WOESHIP. 125 

may well give scepticism as much line as we can. 
The spirit will return, and fill us. It drives the 
drivers. It counterbalances any accumulations of 
power. 

"Heaven kindly gave our blood a moral flow." 

We are born loyal. The whole creation is made 
of hooks and eyes, of bitumen, of sticking-plaster; 
and whether your community is made in Jerusalem 
or in California, of saints or of wreckers, it coheres 
in a perfect ball. Men as naturally make a state, 
or a church, as caterpillars a web. If they were 
more refined, it would be less formal, it would be 
nervous, like that of the Shakers, who, from long 
habit of thinking and feeling together, it is said, are 
affected in the same way, at the same time, to work 
and to play, and as they go with perfect sympathy 
to their tasks in the field or shop, so are they in- 
clined for a ride or a journey at the same instant, 
and the horses come up with the family carriage 
unbespoken to the door. 

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as 
a tree bears apples. A self-poise belongs to every 
particle ; and a rectitude to every mind, and is the 
Nemesis and protector of every society. I and my 
neighbours have been bred in the notion, that, unless 
we came soon to some good church, — Calvinism, 
or Behmenism, or Romanism, or Mormonism, — 
there would be a universal thaw and dissolution. 
No Isaiah or Jeremy has arrived. Nothing can 
exceed the anarchy that has followed in our skies. 
The stern old faiths have all pulverized. 'Tis a 
whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in 
search of religions. 'Tis as flat anarchy in our 
ecclesiastic realms, as that which existed in Massa- 
chusetts in the revolution, or which prevails now 
on the slope of the Rocky Mountains or Pike's 
Peak. Yet we make shift to live. Men are loyal. 
Nature has self-poise in all her works ; certain pro- 



126 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

portions in which oxygen and azote combine, and, 
not less a harmony in faculties, a fitness in the spring 
and the regulator. 

The decline of the influence of Calvin, or Fenelon, 
or Wesley, or Channing, need give us no uneasiness. 
The builder of heaven has not so ill constructed 
his creature as that the religion, that is, the public 
nature, should fall out: the public and the private 
element, like north and south, like inside and out- 
side, like centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every 
soul, and cannot be subdued, except the soul is 
dissipated. God builds his temple in the heart on 
the ruins of churches and religions. 

In the last chapters, we treated some particulars 
of the question of culture. But the whole state 
of man is a state of culture; and its flowering 
and completion may be described as Religion, or 
Worship. There is always some religion, some 
hope and fear extended into the invisible, — from 
the blind boding which nails a horseshoe to the 
mast or the threshold, up to the song of the Elders 
in the Apocalypse. But the religion cannot rise 
above the state of the votary. Heaven always 
bears some proportion to earth. The god of the 
cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a cru- 
sader, and of the merchants a merchant. In all 
ages, souls out of time, extraordinary, prophetic. 
are born, who are rather related to the system of 
the world, than to their particular age and locality, 
These announce absolute truths, which, with what- 
ever reverence received, are speedily dragged down 
into a savage interpretation. The interior tribes of 
our Indians, and some of the Pacific islanders, flog 
their gods, when things take an unfavourable turn. 
The Greek poets did not hesitate to let loose their 
petulant wit on their deities also. Laomedon, in his 
anger at Neptune and Apollo, who had built Troy 
for him, and demanded their pj ce, does not hesitate 



WOESHIP. 127 

to menace them that he will cut their ears off.* 
Among our Norse forefathers, King Olaf 's mode of 
converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan 
of glowing coals on his belly, which hurst asunder. 
ee Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in Christ ? " asks 
Olaf, in excellent faith. Another argument was an 
adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple 
Rand, who refused to believe. 

Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified Euro- 
pean culture, — the grafted or meliorated tree in a 
crab forest. And to marry a pagan wife or husband, 
was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to take a step 
backwards towards the baboon. 

" Hengist had verament 
A daughter both fair and gent, 
But she was heathen Sarazine, 
And Vortigern for love fine 
Her took to fere and to wife, 
And was cursed in all his life; 
Eor he let Christian wed heathen, 
And mixed our blood as flesh and mathen."f 

What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from 
the pagan sources, Richard of Devizes' chronicle of 
Richard I.'s crusade, in the twelfth century, may 
show. King Richard taunts God with forsaking 
him : " Oh, fie ! Oh, how unwilling should I be to 
forsake thee, in so forlorn and dreadful a position, 
were I thy lord and advocate, as thou art mine. 
In sooth, my standards will in future be despised, 
not through my fault, but through thine : in sooth, 
not through any cowardice of my warfare, art thou 
thyself, my King and my God, conquered this day, 
and not Richard thy vassal." The religion of the 
early English poets is anomalous, so devout and so 
blasphemous, in the same breath. Such is Chaucer's 
extraordinary confusion of heaven and earth in the 
picture of Dido : — 

* Eiad, Book xxi. 1. 4 S. f Moths or worms. 



128 CONDUCT OF LIEE. 

" She was fair, 
So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad, 
That if that God that heaven and earthe made 
"Would have a love for beauty and goodness, 
And womanhede, truth, and seemliness, 
Whom should he loven but this lady sweet ? 
There n' is no woman to him half so meet." 

With these grossnesses, we complacently compare 
our own taste and decorum. We think and speak 
with more temperance and gradation, — but is not 
indifferentism as bad as superstition ? 

We live in a transition period, when the old faiths 
which comforted nations, and not only so, but made 
nations, seem to have spent their force. I do not 
find the religions of men at this moment very credit- 
able to them, but either childish and insignificant, or 
unmanly and effeminating. The fatal trait is the 
divorce between religion and morality. Here are 
know-nothing religions, or churches that proscribe 
intellect ; scortatory religions ; slave-holding and 
slave-trading religions ; and, even in the decent 
populations, idolatries wherein the whiteness of the 
ritual covers scarlet indulgence. The lover of the 
old religion complains that our contemporaries, 
scholars as well as merchants, succumb to a great 
despair, — have corrupted into a timorous conser- 
vatism, and believe in nothing. In our large cities, 
the population is godless, materialized, — no bond, 
no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not 
men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites 
walking. How is it people manage to live on, — 
so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn 
aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their 
bones alone held them together, and not any worthy 
purpose. There is no faith in the intellectual, none 
in the moral universe. There is faith in chemistry, 
in meat, and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in 
the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine-wheels, 
sewing machines, and in public opinion, but not in 



. 



WORSHIP. 129 

divine causes. A silent revolution lias loosed the 
tension of the old religious sects, and, in place of the 
gravity and permanence of those societies of opinion, 
they run into freak and extravagance. In creeds 
never was such levity; witness the heathenisms in 
Christianity, the periodic " revivals," the millennium 
mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression 
to Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor 
of mesmerism, the deliration of rappings, the rat 
and mouse revelation, thumps in table-drawers, and 
black art. The architecture, the music, the prayer, 
partake of the madness : the arts sink into shift and 
makebelieve. Not knowing what to do, we ape our 
ancestors ; the churches stagger backward to the 
mummeries of the dark ages. By the irresistible 
maturing of the general mind, the Christian tra- 
ditions have lost their hold. The dogma of the 
mystic offices of Christ being dropped, and he 
standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis 
impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his per- 
sonality ; and it recedes, as all persons must, before 
the sublimity of the moral laws. From this change, 
and in the momentary absence of any religious 
genius that could offset the immense material 
activity, there is a feeling that religion is gone. 
When Paul Leroux offered his article " Dieu " to the 
conductor of a leading French journal, he replied, 
" La question de Dieu manque aVactualite" In Italy, 
Mr. Gladstone said of the late King of Naples, "it 
has been a proverb, that he has erected the negation 
of God into a system of government." In this 
country, the like stupefaction was in the air, and 
the phrase "higher law" became a political jibe. 
What proof of infidelity, like the toleration and 
propagandism of slavery? What, like the direction 
of education ? What, like the facility of conversion ? 
What, like the externality of churches that once 
sucked the roots of right and wrong, and now have 



130 CONDUCT OF LITE. 

perished away till they are a speck of whitewash on 
the wall ? What proof of scepticism like the base 
rate at which the highest mental and moral gifts are 
held? Let a man attain the highest and broadest 
culture that any American has possessed, then let 
him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other 
accident, and all America will acquiesce that the 
best thing has happened to him; that, after the 
education has gone far, such is the expensiveness 
of America, that the best use to put a fine person to, 
is, to drown him to save his board. 

Another scar of this scepticism is the distrust in 
human virtue. It is believed by well-dressed pro- 
prietors that there is no more virtue than they 
possess; that the solid portion of society exist for 
the arts of comfort; that life is an affair to put 
somewhat between the upper and lower mandibles. 
How prompt the suggestion of a low motive ! 
Certain patriots in England devoted themselves 
for years to creating a public opinion that should 
break down the corn-laws and establish free trade. 
" Well," says the man in the street, " Cobden got 
a stipend out of it." Kossuth fled hither across the 
ocean to try if he could rouse the New World to 
a sympathy with European liberty. "Ay" says 
New York, " he made a handsome thing of it, 
enough to make him comfortable for life." 

See what allowance vice finds in the respectable 
and well-conditioned class. If a pickpocket intrude 
into the society of gentlemen, they exert what moral 
force they have, and he finds himself uncomfortable, 
and glad to get away. But if an adventurer go 
through all the forms, procure himself to be elected 
to a post of trust, as of senator, or president, — 
though by the same arts as we detest in the house- 
thief, — the same gentlemen who agree to discounte- 
nance the private rogue, will be forward to show 
civilities and marks of respect to the public one; 



WOKSHIP. 131 

and no amount of evidence of his crimes will prevent 
them giving him ovations,, complimentary dinners, 
opening their own houses to him, and priding them- 
selves on his acquaintance. We were not deceived 
by the professions of the private adventurer, — the 
louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted 
our spoons ; but we appeal to the sanctified preamble 
of the messages and proclamations of the public 
sinner, as the proof of sincerity. It must be that 
they who pay this homage have said to themselves, 
On the whole, we don't know about this that you. 
call honesty ; a bird in the hand is better. 

Even well-disposed, good sort of people, are 
touched with the same infidelity, and for brave, 
straightforward action, use half-measures, and com- 
promises. Forgetful that a little measure is a great 
error, forgetful that a wise mechanic uses a sharp 
tool, they go on choosing the dead men of routine. 
But the official men can in nowise help you in any 
question of to-day, they deriving entirely from the 
old dead things. Only those can help in counsel or 
conduct who did not make a party pledge to defend 
this or that, but who were appointed by God Al- 
mighty, before they came into the world, to stand for 
this which they uphold. 

It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the 
leading men is a vice general throughout American 
society. But the multitude of the sick shall not 
make us deny the existence of health. In spite of 
our imbecility and terrors, and " universal decay of 
religion," &c. &c, the moral sense reappears to-day 
with the same morning newness that has been from 
of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You 
say, there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in 
rainy weather there is no sun, when at that moment 
we are witnessing one of his superlative effects. 
The religion of the cultivated class now, to be sure, 
consists in an avoidance of acts and engagements 

9—2 



132 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

which it was once their religion to assume. But 
this avoidance will yield spontaneous forms in their 
due hour. There is a principle which is the basis 
of things, which all speech aims to say, and all 
action to evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, un- 
describable presence, dwelling very peacefully in us, 
our rightful lord : we are not to do, but to let do ; 
not to work, but to be worked upon ; and to this 
homage there is a consent of all thoughtful and just 
men in all ages and conditions. To this sentiment 
belong vast and sudden enlargements of power. 
'Tis remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists 
with total inexperience of it. It is the order of the 
world to educate with accuracy the senses and the 
understanding ; and the enginery at work to draw 
out these powers in priority, no doubt, has its office. 
But we are never without a hint that these powers 
are mediate and servile, and that we are one day 
to deal with real being, — essences with essences. 
Even the fury of material activity has some results 
friendly to moral health. The energetic action of 
the times develops individualism, and the religious 
appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right 
direction. Heaven deals with us on no represen- 
tative system. Souls are not saved in bundles. The 
Spirit saith to the man, s How is it with thee? thee 
personally? is it well? is it ill?' For a great nature, 
it is a happiness to escape a religious training, — 
religion of character is so apt to be invaded. Reli- 
gion must always be a crab fruit : it cannot be 
grafted and keep its wild beauty. " I have seen," 
said a traveller who had known the extremes of 
society, " I have seen human nature in all its forms ; 
it is everywhere the same, but the wilder it is, the 
more virtuous." 

Yfe say, the old forms of religion decay, and that 
a scepticism devastates the community. I do not 
think it can be cured or stayed by any modification 



WORSHIP. 133 

of tlieologic creeds, much less by theologic disci- 
pline. The cure for false theology is motherwit. 
Forget your books and traditions, and obey your 
moral perceptions at this hour. That which is sig- 
nified by the words " moral " and " spiritual," is a 
lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions we 
have loaded them, will certainly bring back the 
words, age after age, to their ancient meaning. 
I know no words that mean so much. In our 
definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describ- 
ing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is 
real; that law which executes itself, which works 
without means, and which cannot be conceived as 
not existing. Men talk of " mere morality," — which 
is much as if one should say, " poor God, with nobody 
to help him." I find the omnipresence and the 
almightiness in the reaction of every atom in Nature. 
I can best indicate by examples those reactions by 
which every part of Nature replies to the purpose of 
the actor, — beneficently to the good, penally to the 
bad. Let us replace sentimentalism by realism, and 
dare to uncover those simple and terrible laws which, 
be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern. 

Every man takes care that his neighbour shall not 
cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to 
care that he do not cheat his neighbour. Then all 
goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a 
chariot of the sun. What a clay dawns, when we 
have taken to heart the doctrine of faith ! to prefer, 
as a better investment, being to doing ; being to 
seeming ; logic to rhythm and to display ; the year 
to the day ; the life to the year ; character to per- 
formance ; — and have come to know, that justice 
will be done us ; and, if our genius is slow, the term 
will be long. 

'Tis certain that worship stands in some com- 
manding relation to the health of man, and to his 
highest powers, so as to be, in some manner, the 



134 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

source of intellect. All the great ages have been 
ages of belief. I mean, when there was any ex- 
traordinary power of performance, when great 
national movements began, when arts appeared, 
when heroes existed, when poems were made, the 
human soul was in earnest, and had fixed its thoughts 
on spiritual verities, with as strict a grasp as that 
of the hands on the sword, or the pencil, or the 
trowel. It is true that genius takes its rise out 
of the mountains of rectitude ; that all beauty and 
power which men covet, are somehow born out of 
that Alpine district ; that any extraordinary degree 
of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm. 
Thus, I think, we very slowly admit in another man 
a higher degree of moral sentiment than our own, — 
a finer conscience, more impressionable, or which 
marks minuter degrees ; an ear to hear acuter notes 
of right and wrong, than we can. I think we listen 
suspiciously and very slowly to any evidence to that 
point. But, once satisfied of such superiority, we 
set no limit to our expectation of his genius. For 
such persons are nearer to the secret of God than 
others ; are bathed by sweeter waters ; they hear 
notices, they see visions, where others are vacant. 
We believe that holiness confers a certain insight, 
because not by our private, but by our public force, 
can we share and know the nature of things. 

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect 
and morals. Given the equality of two intellects, 
— which will form the most reliable judgments, 
the good or the bad hearted ? " The heart has its 
arguments, with which the understanding is not 
acquainted." For the heart is at once aware of the 
state of health or disease, which is the controlling 
state, that is, of sanity or of insanity, prior, of course, 
to all question of the ingenuity of arguments, the 
amount of facts, or the elegance of rhetoric. So 
intimate is this alliance of mind and heart, that 



WORSHIP. 135 

talent uniformly sinks with character. The bias of 
errors of principle carries away men into perilous 
courses, as soon as their will does not control their 
passion or talent. Hence the extraordinary blunders, 
and final wrong head, into which men spoiled by 
ambition usually fall. Hence the remedy for all 
blunders, the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is 
love. <s As much love, so much mind," said the Latin 
proverb. The superiority that has no superior ; the 
redeemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal 
essence, is love. 

The moral must be the measure of health. If 
your eye is on the eternal, your intellect will grow, 
and your opinions and actions will have a beauty 
which no learning or combined advantages of other 
men can rival. The moment of your loss of faith, 
and acceptance of the lucrative standard, will be 
marked in the pause, or solstice of genius, the sequent 
retrogression, and the inevitable loss of attraction 
to other minds. The vulgar are sensible of the 
change in 3'ou, and of your descent, though they 
clap you on the back, and congratulate you on your 
increased common sense. 

Our recent culture has been in natural science. 
We have learned the manners of the sun and of the 
moon, of the rivers and the rains, of the mineral 
and elemental kingdoms, of plants and animals. 
Man has learned to weigh the sun, and its weight 
neither loses nor gains. The path of a star, the 
moment of an eclipse, can be determined to the 
fraction of a second. Well, to him the book of 
history, the book of love, the lures of passion, and 
the commandments of duty, are opened : and the next 
lesson taught, is the continuation of the inflexible 
law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will, and 
of thought ; that, if in sidereal ages, gravity and 
projection keep their craft, and the ball never loses 
its way in its wild path through space, — a secreter 



136 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

gravitation, a secreter projection, rule not less 
tyrannically in human history, and keep the balance 
of power from age to age unbroken. For, though 
the new element of freedom and an individual 
has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms are 
prefigured and predetermined to moral issues, are in 
search of justice, and ultimate right is done. Religion 
or worship is the attitude of those who see this unity, 
intimacy, and sincerity; who see that, against all 
appearances, the nature of things works for truth and 
right for ever. 

'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those 
of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth. 
Those laws do not stop where our eyes lose them, 
but push the same geometry and chemistry up into 
the invisible plane of social and rational life, so that, 
look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes 
of races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment, 
keeps watch and ward. And this appears in a class 
of facts which concerns all men, within and above 
their creeds. 

Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circum- 
stances : it was somebody's name, or he happened to 
be there at the time, or it was so then, and another 
day it would have been otherwise. Strong men 
believe in cause and effect. The man was born to 
do it, and his father was born to be the father of him 
and of this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall 
see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a 
problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry. 
The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, 
and all things go by number, rule, and weight. 

Scepticism is unbelief in cause and effect. A man 
does not see, that, as he eats, so he thinks : as he 
deals, so he is, and so he appears ; he does not see, 
that his son is the son of his thoughts and of his 
actions ; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits ; 
that relation and connection are not somewhere and 



WORSHIP. 137 

sometimes, but everywhere and always ; no mis- 
cellany, no exemption, no anomaly, — but method, 
and an even web ; and what comes out, that was put 
in. As we are, so we do ; and as we do, so is it done 
to us ; we are the builders of our fortunes ; cant and 
lying and the attempt to secure a good which does 
not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain. 
But, in the human mind, this tie of fate is made 
alive. The law is the basis of the human mind. In 
us, it is inspiration ; out there in Nature, we see its 
fatal strength. We call it the moral sentiment. 

We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of 
Law, which compares well with any in our Western 
books. " Law it is, which is without name, or colour, 
or hands, or feet ; which is smallest of the least, 
and largest of the large ; all, and knowing all things ; 
which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves 
without feet, and seizes without hands." 

If any reader tax me with using vague and tra- 
ditional phrases, let me suggest to him, by a few 
examples, what kind of a trust this is, and how real. 
Let me show him that the dice are loaded ; that the 
colours are fast, because they are the native colours 
of the fleece; that the globe is a battery, because 
every atom is a magnet; and that the police and 
sincerity of the Universe are secured by God's dele- 
gating his divinity to every particle ; that there is no 
room for hypocrisy, no margin for choice. 

The countryman leaving his native village, for the 
first time, and going abroad, finds all his habits 
broken up. In a new nation and language, his sect, 
as Quaker, or Lutheran, is lost. What! it is not 
then necessary to the order and existence of society ? 
He misses this, and the commanding eye of his 
neighbourhood, which held him to decorum. This 
is the peril of New York, of New Orleans, of London, 
of Paris, to young men. But after a little expe- 
rience, he makes the discovery that there are no 



138 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

large cities, — none large enough to hide in ; that the 
censors of action are as numerous and as near in 
Paris, as in Littleton or Portland ; that the gossip is 
as prompt and vengeful. There is no concealment, 
and, for each offence, a several vengeance ; that, re- 
action, or nothing for nothing, or, things are as broad 
as they are long, is not a rule for Littleton or Port- 
land, but for the Universe, 

We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue. 
We are disgusted by gossip ; yet it is of importance 
to keep the angels in their proprieties. The smallest 
fly will draw blood, and gossip is a weapon impos- 
sible to exclude from the privatest, highest, selectest. 
Nature created a police of many ranks. God has 
delegated himself to a million deputies. From these 
low external penalties, the scale ascends. Next come 
the resentments, the fears, which injustice calls out; 
then, the false relations in which the offender is put 
to other men ; and the reaction of his fault on him- 
self, in the solitude and devastation of his mind. 

You cannot hide any secret. If the artist succour 
his flagging spirits by opium or wine, his work will 
characterize itself as the effect of opium or wine. If 
you make a picture or a statue, it sets the beholder 
in that state of mind you had, when you made it. If 
you spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on 
pictures, or on equipages, it will so appear. We are 
all physiognomists and penetrators of character, and 
things themselves are detective. If you follow the 
suburban fashion in building a sumptuous-looking 
house for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as 
a cheap dear house. There is no privacy that cannot 
be penetrated. No secret can be kept in the civilized 
world. Society is a masked ball 5 where every one 
hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding. If 
a man wish to conceal anything he carries, those 
whom he meets know that he conceals somewhat, and 
usually know what he conceals. Is it otherwise if 



WORSHIP. 139 

there be some belief or some purpose he would bury 
in his breast ? Tis as hard to hide as fire. He is a 
strong man who can hold down his opinion. A man 
cannot utter two or three sentences, without disclosing 
to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life 
and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the 
senses and the understanding, or in that of ideas and 
imagination, in the realm of intuitions and duty. 
People seem not to see that their opinion of the 
world is also a confession of character. We can 
only see what we are, and if we misbehave we 
suspect others. The fame of Shakspeare or of Vol- 
taire, of Thomas a Kempis or of Bonaparte, charac- 
terizes those who give it. As gas-light is found to 
be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects 
itself by pitiless publicity. 

Each must be armed — not necessarily with musket 
and pike. Happy, if, seeing these, he can feel that 
he has better muskets and pikes in his energy and 
constancy. To every creature is his own weapon, 
however skilfully concealed from himself, a good 
while. His work is sword and shield. Let him 
accuse none, let him injure none. The way to mend 
the bad world, is to create the right world. Here is 
a low political economy plotting to cut the throat of 
foreign competition, and establish our own; — ex- 
cluding others by force, or making war on them ; or, 
by cunning tariffs, giving preference to worse wares 
of ours. But the real and lasting victories are those 
of peace, and not of war. The way to conquer the 
foreign artisan, is, not to kill him, but to beat his 
work. And the Crystal Palaces and World Fairs, 
with their committees and prizes on all kinds of 
industry, are the result of this feeling. The Ame- 
rican workman who strikes ten blows with his 
hammer, whilst the foreign workman only strikes 
one, is as really vanquishing that foreigner, as if the 
blows were aimed at and told on his person. I look 



140 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

on that man as happy, who, when there is question 
of success, looks into his work for a reply, not into 
the market, not into opinion, not into patronage. In 
every variety of human employment, in the mechani- 
cal and in the fine arts, in navigation, in farming, in 
legislating, there are among the numbers who do 
their task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass, 
and as badly as they dare, — there are the working- 
men, on whom the burden cf the business falls, — 
those who love work, and love to see it rightly done, 
who finish their task for its own sake ; and the state 
and the world is happy, that has the most of such 
finishers. The world will always do justice at last 
to such finishers : it cannot otherwise. He who has 
acquired the ability, may wait securely the occasion 
of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it 
will not loiter. Men talk as if victory were some- 
thing fortunate. Work is victory. Wherever work 
is done, victory is obtained. There is no chance, and 
no blanks. You want but one verdict : if you have 
your own, you are secure of the rest. And yet, if 
witnesses are wanted, witnesses are near. There was 
never a man born so wise or good, but one or more 
companions came into the world with him, who de- 
light in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see 
without awe, that no man thinks alone, and no man 
acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with 
him into life, — now under one disguise, now under 
another, — like a police in citizens' clothes, walk with 
him, step for step, through all the kingdom of time. 

This reaction, this sincerity, is the property of all 
things. To make our word or act sublime, we must 
make it real. It is our system that counts, not the 
single word or unsupported action. Use what lan- 
guage you will, you can never say anything but what 
you are. What I am, and what I think, is conveyed 
to you, in spite of my efforts to hold it back. What 
I am has been secretly conveyed from me to another, 



WORSHIP. 141 

whilst I was vainly making up my mind to tell him 
it. He has heard from me what I never spoke. 

As men get on in life, they acquire a love for 
sincerity, and somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or 
amused. In the progress of the character, there is 
an increasing faith in the moral sentiment, and a de- 
creasing faith in propositions. Young people admire 
talents, and particular excellences. As we grow 
older, we value total powers and effects, as the spirit, 
or quality of the man. We have another sight, and 
a new standard ; an insight which disregards what is 
done for the eye, and pierces to the doer ; an ear 
which hears not what men say, but hears what they 
do not say. 

There was a wise, devout man who is called, in 
the Catholic Church, St. Philip Neri, of whom many 
anecdotes touching his discernment and benevolence 
are told at Naples and Rome. Among the nuns in a 
convent not far from Rome, one had appeared, who 
laid claim to certain rare gifts of inspiration and pro- 
phecy, and the abbess advised the Holy Father, at 
Rome, of the wonderful powers shown by her novice. 
The Pope did not well know what to make of these 
new claims, and Philip coming in from a journey 
one day, he consulted him. Philip undertook to 
visit the nun, and ascertain her character. He threw 
himself on his mule, all travel-soiled as he was, and 
hastened through the mud and mire to the distant 
convent. He told the abbess the wishes of his Holi- 
ness, and begged her to summon the nun without 
delay. The nun was sent for, and, as soon as she 
came into the apartment, Philip stretched out his leg 
all bespattered with mud, and desired her to draw off 
his boots. The young nun, who had become the 
object of much attention and respect, drew back 
with anger, and refused the office : Philip ran out 
of doors, mounted his mule, and returned instantly 
to the Pope : " Give yourself no uneasiness, Holy 



142 CONDUCT OE LIFE. 

Father, any longer : here is no miracle, for here is no 
humility." 

We need not much mind what people please to 
say, but what they must say; what their natures 
say, though their busy, artful, Yankee understand- 
ings try to hold back, and choke that word, and 
to articulate something different. If we will sit 
quietly, — what they ought to say is said, with their 
will, or against their will. We do not care for 
you, let us pretend what we will: we are always 
looking through you to the dim dictator behind 
you. Whilst your habit or whim chatters, we 
civilly and impatiently wait until that wise superior 
shall speak again. Even children are not deceived 
by the false reasons which their parents give in 
answer to their questions, whether touching natural 
facts, or religion, or persons. When the parent, 
instead of thinking how it really is, puts them off 
with a traditional or a hypocritical answer, the children 
perceive that it is traditional or hypocritical. To 
a sound constitution the defect of another is at once 
manifest: and the marks of it are only concealed 
from us by our own dislocation. An anatomical 
observer remarks, that the sympathies of the chest, 
abdomen, and pelvis, tell at last on the face, and on 
all its features. Not only does our beauty waste, 
but it leaves word how it went to waste. Phy- 
siognomy and phrenology are not new sciences, 
but declarations of the soul that it is aware of certain 
new sources of information. And now sciences of 
broader scope are starting up behind these. And so 
for ourselves, it is really of little importance what 
blunders in statement we make, so only we make no 
wilful departures from the truth. How a man's 
truth comes to mind, long after we have forgotten 
all Ins words ! How it comes ..to us in silent hours, 
that truth is our only armour in all passages of life 
and death ! Wit is cheap, and anger is cheap ; but 



WOESHIP. 143 

if you cannot argue or explain yourself to the other 
party, cleave to the truth against me, against thee, 
and you gain a station from which you cannot be 
dislodged. The other party will forget the words 
that you spoke, but the part you took continues to 
plead for you. 

Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which 
life offers me? I am well assured that the Ques- 
tioner, who brings me so many problems, will bring 
the answers also in due time. Very rich, very 
potent, very cheerful Giver that he is, he shall have 
it all his own way, for me. Why should I give up 
my thought, because I cannot answer an objection 
to it? Consider only, whether it remains in my 
life the same it was. That only which we have 
within, can we see without. If we meet no gods, 
it is because we harbour none. If there is grandeur 
in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps. 
He only is rightly immortal, to whom all things 
are immortal. I have read somewhere, that none 
is accomplished, so long as any are incomplete ; that 
the happiness of one cannot consist with the misery 
of any other. 

The Buddhists say, " No seed will die : " every 
seed will grow. Where is the service which can 
escape its remuneration ? What is vulgar, and the 
essence of all vulgarity, but the avarice of reward? 
'Tis the difference of artisan and artist, of talent 
and genius, of sinner and saint. The man whose 
eyes are nailed not on the nature of his act, but on 
the wages, whether it be money, or office, or fame, 
— is almost equally low. He is great, whose eyes 
are opened to see that the reward of actions cannot 
be escaped, because he is transformed into his action, 
and taketh its nature, which bears its own fruit, 
like every other tree. A great man cannot be 
hindered of the effect of his act, because it is im- 
mediate. The genius of life is friendly to the noble, 



144 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

and in the dark brings them friends from far. Fear 
God, and where yon go, men shall think they walk 
in hallowed cathedrals. 

And so I look on those sentiments which make 
the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, 
as being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms ; 
and, that, as soon as the man is right, assurances 
and previsions emanate from the interior of his 
body and his mind ; as, when flowers reach their 
ripeness, incense exhales from them, and, as a 
beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet 
by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and 
soils. 

Thus man is made equal to every event. He 
can face danger for the right. A poor, tender, 
painful body, he can run into flame or bullets or 
pestilence, with duty for his guide. He feels the 
insurance of a just employment. I am not afraid 
of accident, as long as I am in my place. It is 
strange that superior persons should not feel that 
they have some better resistance against cholera, 
than avoiding green peas and salads. Life is hardly 
respectable — is it ? — if it has no generous, guaran- 
teeing task, no duties or affections, that constitute 
a necessity of existing. Every man's task is his life- 
preserver. The conviction that his work is dear 
to God and cannot be spared, defends him. The 
lightning-rod that disarms the cloud of its threat 
is his body in its duty. A high aim reacts on 
the means, on the days, on the organs of the 
body. A high aim is curative, as well as arnica. 
"Napoleon," says Goethe, "visited those sick of 
the plague, in order to prove that the man who 
could vanquish fear, could vanquish the plague also ; 
and he was right. 'Tis incredible what force the 
will has in such cases : it penetrates the body, and 
puts it in a state of activity, which repels all hurtful 
influences ; whilst fear invites them." 



WOKSHIP. 145 

It is related of William of Orange, that, whilst lie 
was besieging a town on the continent, a gentleman 
sent to him on public business came to his camp, 
and, learning that the king was before the walls, he 
ventured to go where he was. He found him direct- 
ing the operation of his gunners, and, having ex- 
plained his errand, and received his answer, the king- 
said, " Do you not know, sir, that every moment 
you spend here is at the risk of your life ? " "I run 
no more risk," replied the gentleman, "than your 
majesty." " Yes," said the king, " but my duty 
brings me here, and yours does not." In a few 
minutes, a cannon-ball fell on the spot, and the gen- 
tleman was killed. 

Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warn- 
ings of his early instinct, under the guidance of a 
deeper instinct. He learns to welcome misfortune, 
learns that adversity is the prosperity of the great. 
He learns the greatness of humility. He shall work 
in the dark, work against failure, pain, and ill-will. 
If he is insulted, he can be insulted ; all his affair is 
not to insult. Hafiz writes, — 

" At the last day, men shall wear 
On their heads the dust, 
As ensign and as ornament 
Of their lowly trust." 

The moral equalizes all ; enriches, empowers all. 
It is the coin which buys all, and which all find in 
their pocket. Under the whip of the driver, the 
slave shall feel his equality with saints and heroes. 
In the greatest destitution and calamity, it surprises 
man with a feeling of elasticity which makes nothing 
of loss. 

I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose 
life and discourse betrayed many inspirations of this 
sentiment. Benedict was always great in the pre- 
sent time. He had hoarded nothing from the past, 
neither in his cabinets, neither in his memory. He 

10 



146 CONDUCT OF LITE. 

had no designs on the future, neither for what he 
should do to men, nor for what men should do for 
him. He said, {i I am never beaten until I know that 
I am beaten. I meet powerful brutal people to whom 
I have no skill to reply. They think they have 
defeated me. It is so published in society, in the 
journals ; I am defeated in this fashion, in all men's 
sight, perhaps on a dozen different lines. My ledger 
may show that I am in debt, cannot yet make my 
ends meet, and vanquish the enemy so. My race 
may not be prospering : we are sick, ugly, obscure, 
unpopular. My children may be worsted. I seem 
to fail in my friends and clients, too ; that is to say, 
in all the encounters that have yet chanced, I have 
not been weaponed for that particular occasion, and 
have been historically beaten ; and yet I know, all 
the time, that I have never been beaten — have never 
yet fought, shall certainly fight, when my hour comes, 
and shall beat." " A man," says the Vishnu Sarma, 
"who, having well compared his own strength or 
weakness with that of others, after all doth not know 
the difference, is easily overcome by his enemies.'' 

" I spent," he said, " ten months in the country. 
Thick -starred Orion was my only companion. 
Wherever a squirrel or a bee can go with security, 
I can go. I ate whatever was set before me ; I 
touched ivy and dogwood. When I went abroad, 
I kept company with every man on the road, for I 
knew that my evil and my good did not come from 
these, but from the Spirit, whose servant I was. For 
I could not stoop to be a circumstance, as they did, 
who put their life into their fortune and their com- 
pany. I would not degrade myself by casting about 
in my memory for a thought, nor by waiting for one. 
If the thought come, I would give it entertainment. 
It should, as it ought, go into my hands and feet ; 
but if it come not spontaneously, it comes not rightly 
at all. If it can spare me, I am sure I can spare it. 






WORSHIP. 147 

It shall be the same with my friends. I will never 
woo the loveliest. I will not ask any friendship or 
favour. When I come to my own, we shall both 
know it. Nothing will be to be asked or to be 
granted." Benedict went out to seek his friend, and 
met him on the way ; but he expressed no surprise 
at any coincidences. On the other hand, if he called 
at the door of his friend, and he was not at home, he 
did not go again; concluding that he had misinter- 
preted the intimations. 

He had the whim not to make an apology to the 
same individual whom he had wronged ; for this, he 
said, was a piece of personal vanity ; but he would 
correct his conduct in that respect in which he had 
faulted, to the next person he should meet. Thus, 
he said, universal justice was satisfied. 

Mira came to ask what she should do with the 
poor Genesee woman who had hired herself to work 
for her, at a shilling a day, and, now, sickening, was 
like to be bedridden on her hands. Should she keep 
her, or should she dismiss her ? But Benedict said, 
" Why ask ? One thing will clear itself as the thing 
to be done, and not another, when the hour comes. 
Is it a question, whether to put her into the street ? 
Just as much whether to thrust the little Jenny on 
your arm into the street. The milk and meal you 
give the beggar will fatten Jenny. Thrust the 
w^oman out, and you thrust your babe out of doors, 
whether it so seem to you or not." 

In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of belief, 
in the doctrine which they faithfully hold, that en- 
courages them to open their doors to every wayfaring 
man who proposes to come among them ; for, they say, 
the Spirit will presently manifest to the man himself, 
and to the society, what manner of person he is, and 
whether he belongs among them. They do not receive 
him, they do not reject him. And not in vain have 
they worn their clay coat, and drudged in their fields, 

10—2 



148 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

and shuffled in their Bruin dance, from year to year, 
if they have truly learned thus much wisdom. 

Honour him whose life is perpetual victory ; him, 
who, by sympathy with the invisible and real, finds 
support in labour, instead of praise — who does not 
shine, and would rather not. With eyes open, he 
makes the choice of virtue, which outrages the vir- 
tuous ; of religion, which churches stop their discords 
to burn and exterminate : for the highest virtue is 
always against the law. 

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the 
arithmetician. Talent and success interest me but 
moderately. The great class, they who affect our 
imagination, the men who could not make their 
hands meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, 
the fools of ideas — they suggest what they cannot 
execute. They speak to the ages, and are heard 
from afar. The Spirit does not love cripples and 
malformations. If there ever was a good man, be 
certain, there was another, and will be more. 

And so in relation to that future hour, that spectre 
clothed with beauty at our curtain by night, at our 
table by day — the apprehension, the assurance of a 
coming change. The race of mankind have always 
offered at least this implied thanks for the gift of 
existence, namely, the terror of its being taken away; 
the insatiable curiosity and appetite for its continua- 
tion. The whole revelation that is vouchsafed us is 
the gentle trust, which, in our experience we find, 
will cover also with flowers the slopes of this chasm. 

Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is 
incurious. It is so well, that it is sure it will be 
well. It asks no questions of the Supreme Power. 
The son of Antiochus asked his father when he 
would join battle. " Dost thou fear," replied the 
king, " that thou only in all the army wilt not hear 
the trumpet ? " 'Tis a higher thing to confide, that, 
if it is best we should live, we shall live ; 'tis higher 



WORSHIP. 149 

to have this conviction, than to have the lease of in- 
definite centuries and millenniums and aeons. Higher 
than the question of our duration is the question of 
our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are 
fit for it, and he who would be a great soul in future, 
must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine too great 
to rest on any legend — that is, on any man's expe- 
rience but our own. It must be proved, if at all, 
from our own activity and designs, which imply an 
interminable future for their play. 

What is called religion effeminates and demo- 
ralizes. Such as you are, the gods themselves could 
not help you. Men are too often unfit to live, from 
their obvious inequality to their own necessities ; or 
they suffer from politics, or bad neighbours, or from 
sickness, and they would gladly know that they were 
to be dismissed from the duties of life. But the wise 
instinct asks, " How will death help them ? " These 
are not dismissed when they die. You shall not wish 
for death out of pusillanimity The weight of the 
universe is pressed down on the shoulders of each 
moral agent to hold him to his task. The only path 
of escape known in all the worlds of God is perform- 
ance. You must do your work, before you shall be 
released. And as far as it is a question of fact re- 
specting the government of the Universe, Marcus 
Antoninus summed the whole in 'a word — "It is 
pleasant to die, if there be gods ; and sad to live, if 
there be none." 

And so I think that the last lesson of life, the 
choral song which rises f^om all elements and all 
angels, is a voluntary obedience, a necessitated free- 
dom. Man is made of the same atoms as the world 
is ; he shares the same impressions, predispositions, 
and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, wheij 
his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the 
sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the 
stones do by structure. 



150 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

The religion which is to guide and fulfil the pre- 
sent and coming ages, whatever else it be, must be 
intellectual. The scientific mind must have a faith 
which is science. " There are two things," said 
Mahomet, " which I abhor — the learned in his infi- 
delities, and the fool in his devotions." Our times 
are impatient of both, and specially of the last. Let 
us have nothing now which is not its own evidence. 
There is surely enough for the heart and imagina- 
tion in the religion itself. Let us not be pestered 
with assertions and half-truths, with emotions and 
snuffle. 

There will be a new church founded on moral 
science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger 
again, the algebra and mathematics of ethical law, 
the church of men to come, without shawms, or 
psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and 
earth for its beams and rafters ; science for symbol 
and illustration ; it will fast enough gather beauty, 
music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern 
and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home 
to his central solitude, shame these social, suppli- 
cating manners, and make him know that much of 
the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall 
expect no co-operation, he shall walk with no com- 
panion. The nameless Thought, the nameless Power, 
the superpersonal Heart — he shall repose alone on 
that. He needs only his own verdict. No good 
fame can help, no bad fame can hurt him. The 
laws are his consolers, the good laws themselves are 
alive; they know if he have kept them; they animate 
him with the leading of great duty, and an endless 
horizon. Honour and fortune exist to him who 
always recognizes the neighbourhood of the great, 
always feels himself in the presence of high causes. 



151 



VII.-CONSIDEEATIONS BY THE WAY. 

Hear what British Merlin sung, 

Of keenest eye and truest tongue. 

Say not, the chiefs who first arrive 

Usurp the seats for which all strive; 

The forefathers this land who found 

Failed to plant the vantage-ground; 

Ever from one who comes to-morrow 

Men wait their good and truth to borrow. 

But wilt thou measure all thy road, 

See thou lift the lightest load. 

Who has little, to him who has less, can spare, 

And thou, Cyndyllan's son ! beware 

Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear, 

To falter ere thou thy task fulfil, — 

Only the light- armed climb the hill. 

The richest of all lords is Use, 

And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse. 

Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, 

Drink the wild air's salubrity: 

Where the star Canope shines in May, 

Shepherds are thankful, and nations gay. 

The music that can deepest reach, 

And cure all ill, is eordial speech: 

Mask thy wisdom with delight, 

Toy with the bow, yet hit the white. 

Of all wit's uses, the main one 

Is to live well with who has none. 

Cleave to thine acre ; the round year 

Will fetch all fruits and virtues here : 

Tool and foe may harmless roam, 

Loved and lovers bide at home. 

A day for toil, an hour for sport, 

But for a friend is life too short. 

Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, 
I confess that life is rather a subject of wonder, than 
of didactics. So much fate, so much irresistible dic- 
tation from temperament and unknown inspiration, 
enters into it, that we doubt we can say anything out 
of our own experience whereby to help each other. 
All the professions are timid and expectant agencies. 
The priest is glad if his prayers or his sermon meet 



152 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

tlie condition of any soul ; if of two, if of ten, 'tis a 
signal success. But he walked to the church without 
any assurance that he knew the distemper, or could 
heal it. The physician prescribes hesitatingly out of 
his few resources, the same tonic or sedative to this 
new and peculiar constitution, which he has applied 
with various success to a hundred men before. If the 
patient mends, he is glad and surprised. The lawyer 
advises the client, and tells his story to the jury, and 
leaves it with them, and is as gay and as much 
relieved as the client, if it turns out that he has a 
verdict. The judge weighs the arguments, and puts a 
brave face on the matter, and, since there must be a 
decision, decides as he can, and hopes he has done 
justice, and given satisfaction to the community ; but 
is only an advocate after all. And so is all life a 
timid and unskilful spectator. We do what we must, 
and call it by the best names. We like very well to 
be praised for our action, but our conscience says, 
" Not unto us." 'Tis little we can do for each other. 
We accompany the youth with sympathy, and mani- 
fold old sayings of the wise, to the gate of the arena, 
but 'tis certain that not by strength of ours, or of the 
old sayings, but only on strength of his own, unknown 
to us or to any, he must stand or fall. That by 
which a man conquers in any passage, is a profound 
secret to every other being in the world, and it is only 
as he turns his back on us and on all men, and draws 
on this most private wisdom, that any good can come 
to him. What we have, therefore, to say of life, is 
rather description, or, if you please, celebration, than 
available rules. 

Yet vigour is contagious, and whatever makes us 
either think or feel strongly adds to our power, and 
enlarges our field of action. We have a debt to 
every great heart, to every fine genius ; to those who 
have put life and fortune on the cast of an act of 
justice ; to those who have added new sciences ; to 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 153 

those who have refined life by elegant pursuits, 'Tis 
the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called 
fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection 
against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern. 
Fine society, in the common acceptation, has neither 
ideas nor aims. It renders the service of a per- 
fumery, or a laundry, not of a farm or factory. 'Tis 
an exclusion and a precinct. Sidney Smith said, 
" A few yards in London cement or dissolve friend- 
ship." It is an unprincipled decorum; an affair of 
clean linen and coaches, of gloves, cards, and 
elegance in trifles. There are other measures of 
self-respect for a man, than the number of clean 
shirts he puts on every day. Society wishes to be 
amused. I do not wish to be amused. I wish that 
life should not be cheap, but sacred. I wish the 
days to be as centuries, loaded, fragrant. Now we 
reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is 
to be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some 
pleasure we are to taste. Is all we have to do to 
draw the breath in, and blow it out again ? Por- 
phyry's definition is better : " Life is that which 
holds matter together." The babe in arms is a 
channel through which the energies we call fate, 
love, and reason, visibly stream. See what a come- 
tary train of auxiliaries man carries with him, of 
animals, plants, stones, gases, and imponderable 
elements. Let us infer his ends from this pomp of 
means. Mirabeau said, " Why should we feel our- 
selves to be men, unless it be to succeed in every- 
thing, everywhere. You must say of nothing, That 
is beneath me, nor feel that anything can be out of 
your power. Nothing is impossible to the man who 
can will. Is that necessary f That shall be : — this 
is the only law of success." Whoever said it, this 
is in the right key. But this is not the tone and 
genius of the men in the street. In the streets, we 
grow cynical. The men we meet are coarse and 



154 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

torpid. The finest wits have their sediment. What 
quantities of fribbles, paupers, invalids, epicures, 
antiquaries, politicians, thieves, and triflers of both 
sexes, might be advantageously spared ! Mankind 
divides itself into two classes, — benefactors and male- 
factors. The second class is vast, the first a handful. 
A person seldom falls sick, but the bystanders are 
animated with a faint hope that he will die : — 
quantities of poor lives ; of distressing invalids ; of 
cases for a gun. Franklin said, " Mankind are very 
superficial and dastardly : they begin upon a thing, 
but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly from it dis- 
couraged : but they have capacities, if they would 
employ them." Shall we then judge a country by 
the majority, or by the minority ? By the minority, 
surely. 'Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the 
census, or by square miles of land, or other than by 
their importance to the mind of the time. 

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. 
Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their 
demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, 
but to be schooled, I wish not to concede any- 
thing to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break 
them up, and draw individuals out of them. The 
worst of charity is, that the lives you are asked to 
preserve are not worth preserving. Masses ! the 
calamity is the masses. I do not wish any mass 
at all, but .honest men only, lovely, sweet, accom- 
plished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow- 
brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni 
at all. If government knew how, I should like to 
see it check, not multiply, the population. When it 
reaches its true law of action, every man that is born 
will be hailed as essential. Away with this hurrah 
of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of 
single men spoken on their honour and their con- 
science. In old Egypt, it was established law, that 
the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred 



CONSIDEEATIONS BY THE WAY. 155 

hands. I think it was much underestimated. " Clay 
and clay differ in dignity," as we discover by our 
preferences every day. What a vicious practice is 
this of our politicians at Washington pairing off ! as 
if one man who votes wrong, going away, could 
excuse you, who mean to vote right, for going 
away; or, as if your presence did not tell in more 
ways than in your vote. Suppose the three hundred 
heroes at Thermopylae had paired off with three hun- 
dred Persians : would it have been all the same to 
Greece and to history ? Napoleon was called by his 
men Cent Mille. Add honesty to him, and they might 
have called him Hundred Million. 

Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is 
good, and shakes down a tree full of gnarled, wormy, 
unripe crabs, before you can find a dozen dessert 
apples; and she scatters nations of naked Indians, 
and nations of clothed Christians, with two or three 
good heads among them. Nature works very hard, 
and only hits the white once in a million throws. 
In mankind, she is contented if she yields one master 
in a century. The more difficulty there is in creat- 
ing good men, the more they are used when they 
come. I once counted in a little neighbourhood, 
and found that every able-bodied man had, say from 
twelve to fifteen persons dependent on him for 
material aid, — to whom he is to be for spoon and 
jug, for backer and sponsor, for nursery and hospital, 
and many functions beside: nor does it seem to make 
much difference whether he is bachelor or patriarch ; 
if he do not violently decline the duties that fall to 
him, this amount of helpfulness will in one way or 
another be brought home to him. This is the tax 
which his abilities pay. The good men are employed 
for private centres of use and for larger influence. 
All revelations, whether of mechanical or intellectual 
or moral science, are made not to communities, but 
to single persons. All the marked events of our 



156 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

day, all the cities, all the colonizations, may be 
traced back to their origin in a private brain. All 
the feats which make our civility were the thoughts 
of a few good heads. 

Meantime, this spawning productivity is not 
noxious or needless. You would say, this rabble of 
nations might be spared. But no, they are all counted 
and depended on. Fate keeps everything alive so 
long as the smallest thread of public necessity holds 
it on to the tree. The coxcomb and bully and thief 
class are allowed as proletaries, every one of their 
vices being the excess or acridity of a virtue. The 
mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee. 
But the units, whereof this mass is composed, are 
neuters, every one of which may be grown to a 
queen-bee. The rule is, we are used as brute atoms, 
until we think : then, we use all the rest. Nature 
turns all malfaisance to good. Nature provided for 
real needs. No sane man at last distrusts himselfl 
His existence is a perfect answer to all sentimental 
cavils. If he is, he is wanted, and has the precise 
properties that are required. That we are here, is 
proof we ought to be here. We have as good right, 
and the same sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or 
Sandy Hook have to be there. 

To say then, the majority are wicked, means no 
malice, no bad heart in the observer, but, simply, 
that the majority are unripe, and have not yet come 
to themselves, do not yet know their opinion. That, 
if they knew it, is an oracle for them and for all. 
But in the passing moment, the quadruped interest 
is very prone to prevail : and this beast- force, whilst 
it makes the discipline of the world, the school of 
heroes, the glory of martyrs, has provoked, in every 
age, the satire of wits, and the tears of good men. 
They find the journals, the clubs, the governments, 
the churches, to be in the interest and the pay of the 
devil. And wise men have met this obstruction in 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 157 

their times, like Socrates, with his famous irony ; like 
Bacon, with life-long dissimulation ; like Erasmus, 
with his book " The Praise of Folly ;" like Rabelais, 
with his satire rending the nations. " They were the 
fools who cried against me, you will say," wrote the 
Chevalier de Boufflers to Grimm ; " ay, but the fools 
have the advantage of numbers, and 'tis that which 
decides. 'Tis of no use for us to make war with 
them; we shall not weaken them; they will always 
be the masters. There will not be a practice or an 
usage introduced, of which they are not the authors." 
In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of 
history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, 
but Bad is sometimes a better. 'Tis the oppressions 
of William the Norman, savage forest-laws, and 
crushing despotism, that made possible the inspira- 
tions of Magna Charta under John. Edward I. 
wanted money, armies, castles, and as much as he 
could get. It was necessary to call the people to- 
gether by shorter, swifter ways, — and the House of 
Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in 
privileges. In the twenty-fourth year of his reign, 
he decreed, " that no tax should be levied without 
consent of Lords and Commons ; " — which is the 
basis of the English Constitution. Plutarch affirms 
that the cruel wars which followed the march of 
Alexander introduced the civility, language, and 
arts of Greece into the savage 'East ; introduced 
marriage; built seventy cities; and united hostile 
nations under one government. The barbarians who 
broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day 
too soon. Schiller says, the Thirty Years' War 
made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish despots 
serve men immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest 
with the Pope ; as the infatuations no less than the 
wisdom of Cromwell ; as the ferocity of the Russian 
czars ; as the fanaticism of the French regicides 
of 1789. The frost which kills the harvest of a 



158 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

year, saves the harvests of a century, by destroying 
the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires, plagues, break 
up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten 
races and dens of distemper, and open a fair field 
to new men. There is a tendency in things to right 
themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy 
that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take 
a new and natural order. The sharpest evils are 
bent into that periodicity which makes the errors 
of planets, and the fevers and distempers of men, 
self-limiting. Nature is upheld by antagonism. 
Passions, resistance, danger, are educators. We 
acquire the strength we have overcome. Without 
war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero. The 
sun were insipid, if the universe were not opaque. 
And the glory of character is in affronting the 
horrors of depravity, to draw thence new nobilities 
of power : as Art lives and thrills in new use and 
combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark 
evermore for blacker pits of night. What would 
painter do, or what would poet or saint, but for 
crucifixions and hells ? And evermore in the world 
is this marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, 
magnificence and rats. Not Antoninus, but a poor 
washer- woman said, "The more trouble, the more 
lion ; that's my principle." 

I do not think very respectfully of the designs or 
the doings of the people who went to California in 
1849. It was a rush and a scramble of needy adven- 
turers, and in the western country a general jail- 
delivery of all the rowdies of the rivers. Some of 
them went with honest purposes, some with very bad 
ones, and all of them with the very commonplace 
wish to find a short way to wealth. But Nature 
watches over all, and turns this malfaisance to good. 
California gets peopled and subdued, — civilized in 
this immoral way, — and, on this fiction, a real pro- 
sperity is rooted and grown. 'Tis a decoy duck ; 'tis 



CONSIDEKATIONS BY THE WAY. 159 

tubs thrown to amuse the whale : but real ducks, and 
whales that yield oil, are caught. And, out of Sabine 
rapes, and out of robbers' forays, real Homes and their 
heroisms come in fulness of time. 

In America, the geography is sublime, but the men 
are not : the inventions are excellent, but the inven- 
tors one is sometimes ashamed of. The agencies by 
which events so grand as the opening of California, 
of Texas, of Oregon, and the junction of the two 
oceans, are effected, are paltry,— coarse selfishness, 
fraud, and conspiracy : and most of the great results 
of history are brought about by discreditable means. 

The benefaction derived in Illinois, and the great 
West, from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceed- 
ing any intentional philanthropy on record. What 
is the benefit done by a good King Alfred, or by a 
Howard, or Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, or Florence 
Nightingale, or any lover, less or larger, compared 
with the involuntary blessing wrought on nations by 
the selfish capitalists who built the Illinois, Michigan, 
and the network of the Mississippi valley roads, which 
have evoked not only all the wealth of the soil, but 
the energy of millions of men, 'Tis a sentence of an- 
cient wisdom, " that God hangs the greatest weights 
on the smallest wires." 

What happens thus to nations, befalls every day in 
private houses. When the friends of a gentleman 
brought to his notice the follies of his sons, with many 
hints of their danger, he replied, that he knew so 
much mischief when he was a boy, and had turned 
out on the whole so successfully, that he was not 
alarmed by the dissipation of boys ; 'twas dangerous 
water, but, he thought, they would soon touch bottom, 
and then swim to the top. This is bold practice, and 
there are many failures to a good escape. Yet one 
would say, that a good understanding would suffice 
as well as moral sensibility to keep one erect ; the 
gratifications of the passions are so quickly seen to be 



160 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

damaging, and — what men like least — seriously 
lowering them in social rank. Then all talent sinks 
with character. 

" Croyez moi, Verreur aussi a son merite" said 
Voltaire. We see those wdio surmount, by dint of 
some egotism or infatuation, obstacles from which 
the prudent recoil. The right partisan is a heady, 
narrow man, who, because he does not see many 
things, sees some one thing with heat and exaggera- 
tion, and, if he falls among other narrow men, or 
on objects which have a brief importance, as some 
trade or politics of the hour, he prefers it to the 
universe, and seems inspired, and a godsend to those 
who wish to magnify the matter, and carry a point. 
Better, certainly, if we could secure the strength and 
fire which rude, passionate men bring into society, 
quite clear of their vices. But who dares draw out 
the linchpin from the waggon- wheel ? 'Tis so mani- 
fest, that there is no moral deformity but is a good 
passion out of place ; that there is no man who is not 
indebted to his foibles; that, according to the old 
oracle, " the Furies are the bonds of men ; " that the 
poisons are our principal medicines, which kill the 
disease, and save the life. In the high prophetic 
phrase, He causes the ivrath of man to praise him, and 
twists and wrenches our evil to our good. Shak- 
speare wrote, — 

" 'Tis said, best men are moulded of their faults;" 

and great educators and lawgivers, and especially 
generals, and leaders of colonies, mainly rely on this 
stuff, and esteem men of irregular and passional force 
the best timber. A man of sense and energy, the 
late head of the Farm School in Boston harbcur, said 
to me, " I want none of your good boys, — give me 
the bad ones." And this is the reason, I suppose, 
why, as soon as the children are good, the mothers 
are scared, and think they are going to die. Mira- 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAT. 161 

beau said, ff There are none but men of strong pas- 
sions capable of going to greatness ; none but such 
capable of meriting the public gratitude." Passion, 
though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring. Any 
absorbing passion has the effect to deliver from the 
little coils and cares of every day : 'tis the heat which 
sets our human atoms spinning, overcomes the fric- 
tion of crossing thresholds, and first addresses in 
society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to 
continue, when once it is begun. In short, there is no 
man wdio is not at some time indebted to his vices, 
as no plant that is not fed from manures. We only 
insist that the man meliorate, and that the plant grow 
upward, and convert the base into the better nature. 
The wise workman will not regret the poverty or 
the solitude which brought out his working talents. 
The youth is charmed with the fine air and accom- 
plishments of the children of fortune. But all great 
men come out of the middle classes. 'Tis better 
for the head ; 'tis better for the heart. Marcus 
Antoninus says, that Fronto told him, " that the so- 
called high-born are for the most part heartless;" 
whilst nothing is so indicative of deepest culture as 
a tender consideration of the ignorant. Charles 
James Fox said of England, " The history of this 
country proves that we are not to expect irom men 
in affluent circumstances the vigilance, energy, and 
exertion without which the House of Commons 
would lose its greatest force and weight. Human 
nature is prone to indulgence, and the most merito- 
rious public services have always been performed 
by persons in a condition of life removed from opu- 
lence." And yet what we ask daily, is to be con- 
ventional. Supply, most kind gods ! this defect in 
my address, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts 
me a little out of the ring : supply it, and let me be 
like the rest whom I admire, and on good terms 
with them. But the wise gods say. No, we have 

11 



162 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

better things for thee. By humiliations, by defeats, 
by loss of sympathy, by gulfs of disparity, learn a 
wider truth and humanity than that of a fine gentle- 
man. A Fifth- Avenue landlord, a West-End house- 
holder, is not the highest style of man : and, though 
good hearts and sound minds are of no condition, 
jet he who is to be wise for many, must not be 
protected. He must know the huts where poor 
men lie, and the chores which poor men do. The 
first-class minds, .ZEsop, Socrates, Cervantes, Shak- 
speare, Franklin, had the poor man's feeling and 
mortification. A rich man was never insulted in 
his life : but this man must be stung. A rich man 
was never in danger from cold, or hunger, or war, 
or ruffians, and you can see he was not, from the 
moderation of his ideas. 'Tis a fatal disadvantage 
to be cockered, and to eat too much cake. What 
tests of manhood could he stand ? Take him out of 
his protections. He is a good book-keeper; or he 
is a shrewd adviser in the insurance office : perhaps 
he could pass a college examination, and take his 
degrees: perhaps he can give wise counsel in a 
court of law. Now plant him down among farmers, 
firemen, Indians, and emigrants. Set a dog on 
him : set a highwayman on him : try him with a 
course of mobs : send him to Kansas, to Pike's Peak, 
to Oregon : and, if he have true faculty, this may 
be the element he wants, and he will come out of 
it with broader wisdom and manly power. iEsop, 
Saadi, Cervantes, Pegnard, have been taken by cor- 
sairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the 
realities of human life. 

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occa- 
sions a good learner would not miss. As we go gladly 
to Faneuil Hall, to be played upon by the stormy 
winds and strong fingers of enraged patriotism, so is 
a fanatical persecution, civil war, national bankruptcy, 
or revolution, more rich in the central tones than 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 163 

languid years of prosperity. What had been, ever 
since our memory, solid continent, yawns apart, and 
discloses its composition and genesis. We learn geo- 
logy the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly 
diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and 
the dry bed of the sea. 

In our life and culture, everything is worked up 
and comes in use — passion, war, revolt, bankruptcy, 
and not less, folly and blunders, insult, ennui, and bad 
company. Nature is a rag-merchant, who works up 
every shred and ort and end into new creations ; like 
a good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his 
laboratory, converting his old shirts into pure white 
sugar. Life is a boundless privilege, and when you 
pay for your ticket, and get into the car, you have 
no guess what good company you shall find there. 
You buy much that is not rendered in the bill. Men 
achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working 
to another aim. 

If now in this connection of discourse, we should 
venture on laying down the first obvious rules of 
life, I will not here repeat the first rule of economy, 
already propounded once and again, that every man 
shall maintain himself, — but I will say, get health. 
No labour, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, 
that can gain it, must be grudged. For sickness is 
a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it 
can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daugh- 
ters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phan- 
tom, absolutely selfish, heedless of what is good and 
great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul and 
afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and 
with ministration to its voracity of trifles. Dr. Johnson 
said severely, " Every man is a rascal as soon as he is 
sick." Drop the cant, and treat it sanely. In dealing 
with the drunken, we do not affect to be drunk. We 
must treat the sick with the same firmness, giving 
them, of course, every aid, — but withholding ourselves. 

11—2 



164 CONDUCT OF LIFE, 

I once asked a clergyman in a retired town, who were 
his companions ? what men of ability he saw ? he re- 
plied, that he spent his time with the sick and the 
dying. I said, he seemed to me to need quite other 
company, and all the more that he had this: for if 
people were sick and dying to any purpose, we would 
leave all and go to them, but, as far as I had observed, 
they were as frivolous as the rest, and sometimes much 
more frivolous. Let us engage our companions not 
to spare us. I knew a wise woman who said to her 
friends, " When I am old, rule me." And the best 
part of health is fine disposition. It is more essential 
than talent, even in the works of talent. Nothing will 
supply the want of sunshine to peaches, and, to make 
knowledge valuable, you must have the cheerfulness 
of wisdom. Whenever you are sincerely pleased, 
you are nourished. The joy of the spirit indicates 
its strength. All healthy things are sweet-tempered. 
Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the 
last ; and, for the reason, that whoever sees the law 
which distributes things, does not despond, but is 
animated to great desires and endeavours. He who 
desponds betrays that he has not seen it. 

'Tis a Dutch proverb, that " paint costs nothing," 
such are its preserving qualities in damp climates. 
Well, sunshine costs less, yet is finer pigment. And 
so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is 
spent, the more of it remains. The latent heat of an 
ounce of wood or stone is inexhaustible. You may 
rub the same chip of pine to the point of kindling, a 
hundred times ; and the power of happiness of any 
soul is not to be computed or drained. It is observed 
that a depression of spirits develops the germs of a 
plague in individuals and nations. • 

It is an old commendation of right behaviour, 
" A His Icetus, sapiens sibi" which our English pro- 
verb translates, " Be merry and wise." I know how 
easy it is to men of the world to look grave and 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 165 

sneer at your sanguine youth, and its glittering 
dreams. JBut I find the gayest castles in the air that 
were ever piled, far better for comfort and for use, 
than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug and 
caverned out by grumbling, discontented people. I 
know those miserable fellows, and I hate them, who 
see a black star always riding through the light and 
coloured clouds in the sky overhead : waves of light 
pass over and hide it for a moment, but the black 
star keeps fast in the zenith. But power dwells 
with cheerfulness ; hope puts us in a working mood, 
whilst despair is no muse, and untunes the active 
powers. A man should make life and Nature happier 
to us, or he had better never been born. When the 
political economist reckons up the unproductive 
classes, he should put at the head this class of pitiers 
of themselves, cravers of sympathy, bewailing imagi- 
nary disasters. An old Trench verse runs, in my 
translation : — 

Some of your griefs you have cured, 
And the sharpest you still have survived; 

But what torments of pain you endured 
Eroru evils that never arrived ! 

There are three wants which never can be satis- 
fied : that of the rich, who wants something more ; 
that of the sick, who wants something different ; and 
that of the traveller, who says, " Any where but here." 
The Turkish cadi said to Layard, " After the fashion 
of thy people, thou hast wandered from one place to 
another, until thou art happy and content in none." 
My countrymen are not less infatuated with the 
rococo toy of Italy. All America seems on the point 
of embarking for Europe. But we shall not always 
traverse seas and lands with light purposes, and for 
pleasure, as we say. One day we shall cast out the 
passion for Europe, by the passion for America. 
Culture will give gravity and domestic rest to those 
who now travel only as not knowing how else to 



166 CONDUCT OP LIFE. 

spend money. Already, who provoke pity like that 
excellent family party just arriving in their well- 
appointed carriage, as far from home and any honest 
end as ever? Each nation has asked successively, 
"What are they here for?" until at last the party 
are shamefaced, and anticipate the question at the 
gates of each town. 

Genial manners are good, and power of accom- 
modation to any circumstance, but the high prize of 
life, the crowning fortune of a man is to he horn with 
a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employ- 
ment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, 
or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or. songs. I 
doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when 
he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being 
actually, not apparently so. 

In childhood, we fancied ourselves walled in by 
the horizon, as by a glass bell, and doubted not, by 
distant travel, we should reach the baths of the 
descending sun and stars. On experiment, the 
horizon flies before us, and leaves us on an endless 
common, sheltered by no glass bell. Yet 'tis strange 
how tenaciously we cling to that bell-astronomy, of a 
protecting domestic horizon. I find the same illusion 
in the search after happiness, which I observe, every 
summer, recommenced in this neighbourhood, soon 
after the pairing of the birds. The young people do 
not like the town, do not like the sea-shore, they will 
go inland; find a dear cottage deep in the mountains, 
secret as their hearts. They set forth on their travels 
in search of a home : they reach Berkshire ; they 
reach Vermont ; they look at the farms ; — good 
farms, high mountain-sides : but where is the seclu- 
sion ? The farm is near this ; 'tis near that ; they 
have got far from Boston, but 'tis near Albany, or 
near Burlington, or near Montreal. They explore a 
farm, but the house is small, old, thin ; discontented 
people lived there, and are gone : — there's too much 



CONSIDEEATIONS BY THE WAY. 167 

sky, too much out-doors ; too public. The youth 
aches for solitude. When he comes to the house, 
he passes through the house. That does not make 
the deep recess he sought. (t Ah ! now, I perceive," 
he says, " it must be deep with persons ; friends only 
can give depth." Yes, but there is a great dearth, 
this year, of friends ; hard to find, and hard to have 
when found : they are just going away : they too are 
in the whirl of the flitting world, and have engage- 
ments and necessities. They are just starting for 
Wisconsin ; have letters from Bremen : — see you 
again, soon. Slow, slow to learn the lesson, that 
there is but one depth, but one interior, and that is— 
his purpose. When joy or calamity or genius shall 
show him it, then woods, then farms, then city shop- 
men and cab-drivers, indifferently with prophet or 
friend, will mirror back to him its unfathomable 
heaven, its populous solitude. 

The uses of travel are occasional, and short ; but 
the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversa- 
tion ; and this is a main function of life. What a 
difference in the hospitality of minds ! Inestimable 
is he to whom we can say what we cannot say to our- 
selves. Others are involuntarily hurtful to us, and 
bereave us of the power of thought, impound and 
imprison us. As, when there is sympathy, there 
needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, 
— so, a blockhead makes a blockhead of his compa- 
nion. Wonderful power to benumb possesses this 
brother. When he comes into the office or public 
room, the society dissolves ; one after another slips 
out, and the apartment is at his disposal. What is 
incurable but a frivolous habit ? A fly is as untam- 
able as a hyena. Yet folly in the sense of fun, fool- 
ing, or dawdling can easily be borne ; as Talleyrand 
said, " I find nonsense singularly refreshing ; " but a 
virulent, aggressive fool taints the reason of a 
household. I have seen a whole family of quiet, 



168 CONDUCT OE LIFE, 

sensible people unhinged and beside themselves, 
victims of such a rogue. For the steady wrong- 
headedness of one perverse person irritates the best : 
since we must withstand absurdity. But resistance 
only exasperates the acrid fool, who believes that 
Nature and gravitation are quite wrong, and he only 
is right. Hence all the dozen inmates are soon per- 
verted, with whatever virtues and industries they 
have, into contradictors, accusers," explainers, and 
repairers of this one malefactor ; like a boat about to 
be overset, or a carriage run away with, — not only 
the foolish pilot or driver, but everybody on board is 
forced to assume strange and ridiculous attitudes, to 
balance the vehicle and prevent the upsetting. For 
remedy, whilst the case is yet mild, I recommend 
phlegm and truth : let all the truth that is spoken or 
done be at the zero of indifferency, or truth itself will 
be folly. But, when the case is seated and malig- 
nant, the only safety is in amputation ; as seamen 
say, you shall cut and run. How to live with unfit 
companions ? — for, with such, life is for the most part 
spent: and experience teaches little better than our 
earliest instinct of self-defence, namely, not to engage, 
not to mix yourself in any manner with them; but 
let their madness spend itself unopposed ; — you are 
you, and I am I. 

Conversation is an art in which a man has all man- 
kind for his competitors, for it is that which all are 
practising every day while they live. Our habit of 
thought, — take men as they rise, — is not satisfying ; 
in the common experience, I fear, it is poor and 
squalid. The success which will content them, is a 
bargain, a lucrative employment, an advantage gained 
over a competitor, a marriage, a patrimony, a legacy, 
and the like. With these objects, their conversation 
deals with surfaces: politics, trade, personal defects, 
exaggerated bad news, and the rain. This is forlorn, 
and they feel sore and sensitive. Now, if one comes 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 169 

who can illuminate this dark house with thoughts, 
show them their native riches, what gifts they have, 
how indispensable each is, what magical powers over 
nature and men ; what access to poetry, religion, and 
the powers which constitute character ; he wakes in 
them the feeliug of worth, his suggestions require 
new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts 
and sciences, — then we come out of our eggshell 
existence into the great dome, and see the zenith over 
and the nadir under us. Instead of the tanks and 
buckets of knowledge to which we are daily confined, 
we come down to the shore of the sea, and dip our 
hands in its miraculous waves. 'Tis wonderful the 
effect on the company. They are not the men they 
were. They have all been to California, and all have 
come back millionnaires. There is no book and no 
pleasure in life comparable to it. Ask what is best 
in our experience, and we shall say, a few pieces of 
plain dealing with w T ise people. Our conversation 
once and again has apprised us that we belong to 
better circles than w T e have yet beheld ; that a mental 
power invites us, whose generalizations are more 
worth for joy and for effect than anything that is now 
called philosophy or literature. In excited conversa- 
tion, we have glimpses of the universe, hints of 
power native to the soul, far-darting lights and 
shadows of an Andes landscape, such as we can 
hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles 
sometimes profusely given, to which the memory 
goes back in barren hours. 

Add the consent of will and temperament, and 
there exists the covenant of friendship. Our chief 
want in life, is somebody who shall make us do what 
we can. This is the service of a friend. With him 
we are easily great. There is a sublime attraction in 
him to whatever virtue is in us. How he flings wide 
the doors of existence ! What questions we ask of 
him ! what an understanding we have ! how few 



170 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

words are needed ! It is the only real society. An 
Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad 
truth, — 

" He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, 
And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere." 

But few writers have said anything better to this 
point than Hafiz, who indicates this relation as the 
test of mental health : " Thou learnest no secret until 
thou knowest friendship, since to the unsound no 
heavenly knowledge enters." Neither is life long 
enough for friendship. That is a serious and majestic 
affair, like a royal presence, or a religion, and not a 
postilion's dinner to be eaten on the run. There is a 
pudency about friendship, as about love, and though 
fine souls never lose sight of it, yet they do not name 
it. With the first class of men our friendship or 
good understanding goes quite behind all accidents of 
estrangement, of condition, of reputation. And yet 
we do not provide for the greatest good of life. We 
take care of our health ; we lay up money ; we make 
our roof tight, and our clothing sufficient ; but who 
provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the 
best property of all, — friends? We know that all 
our training is to fit us for this, and we do not take 
the step towards it. How long shall we sit and wait 
for these benefactors ? 

It makes no difference, in looking back five years, 
how you have been dieted or dressed ; whether you 
have been lodged on the first floor or the attic; 
whether you have had gardens and baths, good 
cattle and horses, have been carried in a neat equipage, 
or in a ridiculous truck : these things are forgotten 
so quickly, and leave no effect. But it counts much 
whether we have had good companions, in that time ; 
— almost as much as what we have been doing. And 
see the overpowering importance of neighbourhood in 
all association. As it is marriage, fit or unfit, that 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 171 

makes our home, so it is who lives near us of equal 
social degree, — a few people at convenient distance, 
no matter how bad company, — these, and these only, 
shall be your life's companions: and all those wdio 
are native, congenial, and by many an oath of the 
heart, sacramented to you, are gradually and totally 
lost. You cannot deal systematically with this fine 
element of society, and one may take a good deal of 
pains to bring people together, and to organize clubs 
and debating societies, and yet no result come of it. 
But it is certain that there is a great deal of good in 
us that does not know itself, and that a habit of union 
and competition brings people up and keeps them up 
to their highest point ; that life would be twice or ten 
times life, if spent with wise and fruitful companions. 
The obvious inference is, a little useful deliberation 
and preconcert, when one goes to buy house and 
land. 

But we live with people on other platforms; we 
live with dependants, not only with the young whom 
we are to teach all we know, and clothe with the 
advantages we have earned, but also with those who 
serve us directly, and for money. Yet the old rules 
hold good. Let not the tie be mercenary, though 
the service is measured by money. Make yourself 
necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to 
any. This point is acquiring new importance in 
American social life. Our domestic service is usually 
a foolish fracas of unreasonable demand on one side, 
and shirking on the other. A man of wit was asked, 
in the train, what was his errand in the city ? He 
replied, " I have been sent to procure an angel to do 
cooking." A lady complained to me, that, of her 
two maidens, one was absent-minded, and the other 
was absent-bodied. And the evil increases, from the 
ignorance and hostility of every ship-load of the 
immigrant population swarming into houses and 
farms. Few people discern that it rests with the 



172 CONDUCT OF LITE. 

master or the mistress, what service comes from the 
man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a 
tutelar spirit in one house, and a harridan in the other. 
All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging 
at every contract to make the terms of it fair. If 
you are proposing only your own, the other party 
must deal a little hardly by you. If you deal gene- 
rously, the other, though selfish and unjust, will make 
an exception in your favour, and deal truly with you. 
When I asked an iron-master about the slag and 
cinder in railroad iron, — " Oh," he said, " there's 
always good iron to be had : if there's cinder in the 
iron, 'tis because there was cinder in the pay." 

But why multiply these topics, and their illus- 
trations, which are endless? Life brings to each 
his task, and, whatever art you select — algebra, 
planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics — 
all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, 
on the same terms, of selecting that for which you 
are apt ; — begin at the beginning, proceed in order, 
step by step. Tis as easy to twist iron anchors, 
and braid cannons, as to braid straw, to boil granite 
as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order. 
Wherever there is failure, there is some giddiness, 
some superstition about luck, some step omitted, 
which Nature never pardons. The happy conditions 
of life may be had on the same terms. Their attrac- 
tion for you is the pledge that they are within your 
reach. Our prayers are prophets. There must be 
fidelity, and there must be adherence. How respec- 
table the life that clings to its objects ! Youthful 
aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of 
life are fair and commendable : — but will you stick ? 
Not one, I fear, in that Common full of people, or, 
in a thousand, but one ; and when you tax them with 
treachery, and remind them of their high resolutions, 
they have forgotten that they made a vow. The in- 
dividuals are fugitive, and in the act of becoming 



CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY. 173 

something else, and irresponsible. The race is great, 
the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure. 
The hero is he who is immovably centred. The 
main difference between people seems to be, that 
one man can come under obligations on which you 
can rely, — is obligable ; and another is not. As 
he has not a law within him, there's nothing to tie 
him to. 

'Tis inevitable to name particulars of virtue, and 
of condition, and to exaggerate them. But all rests 
at last on that integrity which dwarfs talent, and 
can spare it. Sanity consists in not being subdued 
by your means. Fancy prices are paid for position, 
and for the culture of talent, but to the grand in- 
terests, superficial success is of no account. The 
man — it is his attitude — not feats, but forces — not 
on set days and public occasions, but at all hours, 
and in repose alike as in energy, still formidable, and 
not to be disposed of. The populace says, with 
Home Tooke, " If you would be powerful, pretend to 
be powerful." I prefer to say, with the old prophet, 
" Seekest thou great things ? seek them not : " or, 
what was said of a Spanish prince, " The more you 
took from him, the greater he looked." Plus on lid 
ote, plus il est grand. 

The secret of culture is to learn that a few great 
points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the 
obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan 
life, and that these few are alone to be regarded — the 
escape from all false ties; courage to be what we 
are ; and love of what is simple and beautiful ; in- 
dependence, and cheerful relation, these are the 
essentials — these, and the wish to serve — to add 
somewhat to the well-being of men. 



174 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 



VIIL-BEAUTY. 

Was never form and never face 
So sweet to Seyd as only grace 
Which did not slumber like a stone 
But hovered gleaming and was gone. 
Beauty chased he everywhere 
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. 
He smote the lake to feed his eye 

With the beryl beam of the broken wave; 
He flung in pebbles well to hear 

The moment's music which they gave. 
Oft pealed for him a lofty tone 
From nodding pole and belting zone. 
He heard a voice none else could hear 
From centred and from errant sphere. 
The quaking earth did quake in rhyme, 
Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime. 
In dens of passion, and pits of wo, 
He saw strong Eros struggling through, 
To sun the dark and solve the curse, 
And beam to the bounds of the universe. 
While thus to love he gave his days 
In loyal worship, scorning praise, 
How spread their lures for him, in vain, 
Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain ! 
He thought it happier to be dead, 
To die for Beauty, than live for bread. 

The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education 
also. Our books approach very slowly the things we 
most wish to know. What a parade we make of our 
science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is 
from its objects ! Our botany is all names, not 
powers : poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace 
and healing ; but what does the botanist know of the 
virtues of his weeds ? The geologist lays bare the 
strata, and can tell them all on his fingers : but does 
he know what effect passes into the man who builds 
his house in them? what effect on the race that 
inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of 
marl and of alluvium ? 

We should go to the ornithologist with a new feel- 



BEAUTY. 175 

ing, if he could teach us what the social birds say 5 
when they sit in the autumn council, talking together 
in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his 
record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. 
The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its 
relations to Nature ; and the skin or skeleton you 
show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes 
or a bottle of gases into which his body has been 
reduced is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is 
led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied 
advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed 
at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the mea- 
dow, unable to call them by their names, than the 
man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology 
interested us, for it tied man to the system. In- 
stead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, 
and he felt the star. However rash and however 
falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was 
true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large rela- 
tions, and that climate, century, remote natures, as 
well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry 
takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy, 
which sought to transmute one element into another, 
to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the 
right direction. All our science lacks a human side. 
The tenant is more than the house. Buds and stamens 
and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are 
not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in 
order, will take Nature along with him, and emit 
light into all her recesses. The human heart con- 
cerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and 
is larger than can be measured by the pompous 
figures of the astronomer. 

We are just so frivolous and sceptical. Men hold 
themselves cheap and vile : and yet a man is a fagot 
of thunderbolts. All the elements pour through his 
system : he is the flood of the flood, and fire of the 
fire ; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of 



176 • CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

his blood : they are the extension of his personality. 
His duties are measured by that instrument he is ; 
and a right and perfect man would be felt to the 
centre of the Copernican system. 'Tis curious that 
we only believe as deep as we live. We do not 
think heroes can exert any more awful power than that 
surface-play which amuses us. A deep man believes 
in miracles, waits for them ; believes in magic ; believes 
that the orator will decompose his adversary ; believes 
that the evil eye can wither, that the heart's blessing 
can heal ; that love can exalt talent, can overcome 
all odds. From a great heart secret magnetisms flow 
incessantly to draw great events. But we prize very 
humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a 
voter, a citizen, and deprecate any romance of cha- 
racter; and perhaps reckon only his money value, — 
his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of exchange, 
easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures, music, 
and wine. 

The motive of science was the extension of man, 
on all sides, into Nature, till his hands should touch 
the stars, his eyes see through the earth, his ears 
understand the language of beast and bird, and the 
sense of the wind ; and, through his sympathy, 
heaven and earth should talk with him. But that 
is not our science. These geologies, chemistries, 
astronomies, seem to make wise, but they leave us 
where they found us. The invention is of use to 
the inventor, of questionable help to any other. 
The formulas of science are like the papers in your 
pocket-book, of no value to any but the owner. 
Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, 
hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's 
a revenge for this inhumanity. Vv^hat manner of 
man does science make ? The boy is not attracted. 
He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as 
my professor is. The collector has dried all the 
plants in his herbal, but he has lost weight and 



BEAUTY. 177 

humour. He lias got all snakes and lizards in his 
phials, but science has done for him also, and has put 
the man into a bottle. Our reliance on the physician 
is a kind of despair of ourselves. The clergy have 
bronchitis, which does not seem a certificate of 
spiritual health. Macready thought it came of the 
falsetto of their voicing. An Indian prince, Tisso, 
one day riding in the forest, saw a herd of elk sport- 
ing. iS See how happy," he said, " these browsing 
elks are ! Why should not priests, lodged and fed 
comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves ? " 
Returning home, he imparted this reflection to the 
king. The king, on the next day, conferred the 
sovereignty on him, saying, " Prince, administer this 
empire for seven days : at the termination of that 
period, I shall put thee to death." At the end of the 
seventh day, the king inquired, " From what cause 
hast thou become so emaciated ? " He answered, 
" From the horror of death." The monarch rejoined : 
"Live, my child, and be wise. Thou hast ceased 
to take recreation, saying to thyself, In seven days I 
shall be put to death. These priests in the temple 
incessantly meditate on death ; how can they enter 
into healthful diversions ? " But the men of science 
or the doctors or the clergy are not victims of their 
pursuits, more than others. The miller, the lawyer, 
and the merchant, dedicate themselves to their own 
details, and do not come out men of more force. 
Have they divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, 
and the equality to any event, which we demand in 
man, or only the reactions of the mill, of the wares, 
of the chicane ? 

No object really interests us but man, and in man 
only his superiorities; and, though we are aware of a 
perfect law in Nature, it has fascination for us only 
through its relation to him, or as it is rooted in the 
mind. At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a 
hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, depart- 

12 



178 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

mental, post-mortem science, rose an enthusiasm in the 
study of Beauty; and perhaps some sparks from it 
may yet light a conflagration in the other. Know- 
ledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of 
form, and our sensibility to personal influence, never 
go out of fashion. These are facts of a science which 
we study without book, whose teachers and subjects 
are always near us. 

So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of 
our knowledge in this direction belongs to the chap- 
ter of pathology. The crowd in the street oftener 
furnishes degradations than angels or redeemers: but 
they all prove the transparency. Every spirit makes 
its house ; and we can give a shrewd guess from the 
house to the inhabitant. But not less does Nature 
furnish us with every sign of grace and goodness. 
The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school- 
girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air 
of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories 
in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, 
and the varied power in all that well-known company 
thafe escort us through life, — we know how these 
forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us. 

Beauty is the form under which the intellect pre- 
fers to study the world. All privilege is that of 
beauty; for there are many beauties ; as, of general 
nature, of the human face and form, of manners, of 
brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul. 

The ancients believed that a genius or demon took 
possession at birth of each mortal, to guide him ; that 
these genii were sometimes seen as a flame of fire 
partly immersed in the bodies which they governed ; 
— on an evil man, resting on his head ; in a good man, 
mixed with his substance. They thought the same 
genius, at the death of its ward, entered a new-born 
child, and they pretended to guess the pilot, by the 
sailing of the ship. We recognize obscurely the same 
fact, though we give it our own names. We say, that 



BEAUTY. 179 

every man is entitled to be valued by his best mo- 
■ ment. We measure our friends so. We know, they 
have intervals of folly, whereof Ave take no heed, bnt 
wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure 
and beautiful. On the other side, everybody knows 
people who appear beridden, and who, with all degrees 
of ability, never impress us with the air of free 
agency. They know it too, and peep with their eyes 
to see if you detect their sad plight. We fancy could 
we pronounce the solving word, and disenchant them, 
the cloud would roll up, the little rider would be dis- 
covered and unseated, and they would regain their 
freedom. The remedy seems never to be far off, since 
the first step into thought lifts this mountain of neces- 
sity. Thought is the pent air-ball which can rive the 
planet, and the beauty which certain objects have for 
him is the friendly fire which expands the thought 
and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power 
await him. 

The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, 
to thinking of the foundations of things. Goethe 
said, " The beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws 
of Nature, which, but for this appearance, had been 
for ever concealed from us." And the working of 
this deep instinct makes all the excitement — much of 
it superficial and absurd enough — about works of 
art, which leads armies of vain travellers every year 
to Italy, Greece, and Egypt. Every man values 
every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty, 
above his possessions. The most useful man in the 
most useful world, so long as only commodity was 
served, would remain unsatisfied. But, as fast as he 
sees beauty, life acquires a very high value. 

I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers 
not to attempt a definition of Beauty. I will rather 
enumerate a few of its qualities. We ascribe beauty 
to that which is simple ; which has no superfluous 
parts ; which exactlv answers its end ; which stands 

12—2 



180 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

related to all things; which, is the mean of many 
extremes. It is the most enduring quality, and the 
most ascending quality. We say, Love is blind, and 
the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round 
his eyes. Blind : — yes, because he does not see what 
he does not like ; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the 
universe is Love, for finding what he seeks, and only 
that; and the mythologists tell us, that Vulcan was 
painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the 
fact, that one was all limbs, and the other, all eyes. 
In the true mythology, Love is an immortal child, 
and Beauty leads him as a guide : nor can we express 
a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is the pilot 
of the young soul. 

Beyond their sensuous delight the forms and colours 
of Nature have a new charm for us in our percep- 
tion, that not one ornament was added for ornament, 
but is a sign of some better health, or more excellent 
action. Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the 
human figure, marks some excellence of structure : 
or beauty is only an invitation from what belongs to 
us. 'Tis a law of botany, that in plants, the same 
virtues follow the same forms. It is a rule of largest 
application, true in a plant, true in a loaf of bread, 
that in the construction of any fabric or organism, 
any real increase of fitness to its end is an increase of 
beauty. 

The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of 
Gothic art, of antique and of pre-Raphaelite paint- 
ing, was worth all the research, — namely, that all 
beauty must be organic ; that outside embellishment 
is deformity. It is the soundness of the bones that 
ulti mates itself in a peach-bloom complexion : health 
of constitution that makes the sparkle and the power 
of the eye. 'Tis the adjustment of the size and of 
the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that gives 
grace of outline and the finer grace of movement. 
The cat and the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly. 



BEAUTY. 181 

The dancing-master can never teach a badly built 
man to walk well. The tint of the flower proceeds 
from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin 
w r ith its existence. Hence our taste in building 
rejects paint, and all shifts, and shows the original 
grain of the wood : refuses pilasters and columns 
that support nothing, and allows the real supporters 
of the house honestly to show themselves. Every 
necessary or organic action pleases the beholder. A 
man leading a horse to water, a farmer sowing seed, 
the labours of haymakers in the field, the carpenter 
building a ship, the smith at his forge, or whatever 
useful labour, is becoming to the wise eye. But if it 
is done to be seen, it is mean. How t beautiful are 
ships on the sea ! but ships in the theatre, — or ships 
kept for picturesque effect on Virginia Water, by 
George IV., and men hired to stand in fitting costumes 
at a penny an hour! What a difference in effect 
between a battalion of troops inarching to action, and 
one of our independent companies on a holiday ! In 
the midst of a military show, and a festal procession 
gay with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan 
that lay rusting under a wall, and, poising it on tlm 
top of a stick, he set it turning, and made it describe 
the most elegant imaginable curves, and drew away 
attention from the decorated procession by this 
startling beauty. 

Another text from the mythologists. The Greeks 
fabled that Venus was born of the foam of the sea. 
Nothing interests us which is stark or bounded, but 
only what streams with life, what is in act or en- 
deavour to reach somewhat beyond. The pleasure a 
palace or a temple gives the eye is, that an order and 
method has been communicated to stones, so that they 
speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime with 
expression. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if 
the form were just ready to flow into other forms. 
Any fixedness, heaping, or concentration on one 



182 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

feature — a long nose, a sharp chin, a hump-back — 
is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed. 
Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form 
can move, we seek a more excellent symmetry. The 
interruption of equilibrium stimulates the eye to desire 
the restoration of symmetry, and to watch the steps 
through which it is attained. This is the charm 
of running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and 
the locomotion of animals. This is the theory of 
dancing, to recover continually in changes the lost 
equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by 
gradual and curving movements. I have been told 
by persons of experience in matters of taste, that the 
fashions follow a law of gradation, and are never 
arbitrary. The new mode is always only a step on- 
ward in the same direction as the last mode ; and a 
cultivated eye is prepared for and predicts the new 
fashion. This fact suggests the reason of all mistakes 
and offence in our own modes. It is necessary in 
music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear 
by an intermediate note or two to the accord again : 
and many a good experiment, born of good sense, 
and destined to succeed, fails, only because it is offen- 
sively sudden. I suppose the Parisian milliner who 
dresses the world from her imperious boudoir will 
know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the 
eye of mankind, and make it triumphant over Punch 
himself, by interposing the just gradations. I need 
not say how wide the same law ranges ; and how 
much it can be hoped to effect. All that is a little 
harshly claimed by progressive parties, may easily 
come to be conceded without question, if this rule 
be observed. Thus the circumstances may be easily 
imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue 
causes, legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most 
naturally in the world, if only it comes by degrees. 
To this streaming or flowing belongs the beauty that 
all circular movement has; as the circulation of 



BEAUTY. 183 

waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical 
motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, 
the action and reaction of Nature : and, if we follow 
it out, this demand in our thought for an ever-onward 
action, is the argument for the immortality. 

One more text from the mythologists is to the 
same purpose — Beauty rides on a lion. Beauty rests 
on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of 
perfect economy. The cell of thjfe bee is built at that 
angle which gives the most strength with the least 
wax ; the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most 
alar strength with the least weight. " It is the pur- 
gation of superfluities," said Michel Angelo. There 
is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There 
is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for 
every novelty of colour or form : and our art saves 
material, by more skilful arrangement, and reaches 
beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can 
be spared from a wall, and keeping all its strength in 
the poetry of columns. In rhetoric, this art of omis- 
sion is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is 
proof of high culture, to say the greatest matters in 
the simplest way. 

Veracity first of all, and for ever. Rim de heaic 
que le vrai. In all design, art lies in making your 
object prominent, but there is a prior art in choosing 
objects that are prominent. The fine arts have 
nothing casual, but spring from the instincts of the 
nations that created them. 

Beauty is the quality which makes to endure. In 
a house 'that I know, I have noticed, a block of sper- 
maceti lying about closets and mantelpieces, for 
twenty years together, simply because the tallow-man 
gave it the form of a rabbit ; and, I suppose, it may 
continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century. 
Let an artist scrawl a few lines or figures on the back 
of a letter, and that scrap of paper is rescued from 
danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and glazed, and. 



184 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will 
be kept for centuries. Burns writes a copy of verses, 
and sends them to a newspaper, and the human race 
take charge of them that they shall not perish. 

As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how 
surely a beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and 
is copied and reproduced without end. How many 
copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the Venus, 
the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and 
the Temple of Vesta ? These are objects of tender- 
ness to all. In our cities, an ugly building is soon 
removed, and is never repeated, but any beautiful 
building is copied and improved upon, so that all 
masons and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the 
agreeable forms, whilst the ugly ones die out. 

The felicities of design in art, or in works of 
Nature, are shadows or forerunners of that beauty 
which reaches its perfection in the human form. All 
men are its lovers. Wherever it goes, it creates joy 
and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it. It 
reaches its height in woman. " To Eve," say the 
Mahometans, " God gave two-thirds of all beauty." 
A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her 
savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence, 
in all whom she approaches. Some favours of con- 
dition must go with it, since a certain serenity is 
essential, but we love its reproofs and superiorities. 
Nature wishes that woman should attract man, yet 
she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sar- 
casm, which seems to say, " Yes, I am willing to 
attract, but to attract a little better kind of a man 
than any I yet behold." French memoires of the 
fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de 
Viguiere, a virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so 
fired the enthusiasm of her contemporaries, by her 
enchanting form, that the citizens of her native city 
of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities 
to compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at 



BEAUTY. 185 

least twice a week, and, as often as sue showed her- 
self, the crowd was dangerous to life. Not less, in 
England, in the last century, was the fame of the 
Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of 
Hamilton ; and Maria, the Earl of Coventry. Wal- 
pole says, " The concourse was so great, when the 
Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on 
Friday, that even the noble crowd in the drawing- 
room clambered on chairs and tables to look at her. 
There are mobs at their doors to see them get into 
their chairs, and people go early to get places at the 
theatres, when it is known they will be there." 
" Such crowds," he adds, elsewhere, " flock to see the 
Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred people sat 
up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see 
her get into her post-chaise next morning." 

But why need we console ourselves with the 
fames of Helen of Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of 
Toulouse, or the Duchess of Hamilton ? We all 
know this magic very well, or can divine it. It 
does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes 
never so long. Women stand related to beautiful 
Nature around us, and the enamoured youth mixes 
their form with moon and stars, with woods and 
waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of 
awkwardness by their words and looks. We ob- 
serve their intellectual influence on the most serious 
student. They refine and clear his mind ; teach him 
to put a pleasing method into what is dry and diffi- 
cult. We talk to them, and wish to be listened to ; we 
fear to fatigue them, and acquire a facility of expres- 
sion which passes from conversation into habit of style. 

That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the 
perpetual effort of Nature to attain it. Mirabeau 
had an ugly face on a handsome ground ; and we 
see faces every day which have a good type, but 
have been marred in the casting: a proof that we 
are all entitled to beauty, should have been beau- 



186 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

tiful, if our ancestors had kept the laws, — as every 
lily and every rose is well. But our bodies do not 
fit us, but caricature and satirize us. Thus, short 
legs, which constrain us to short, mincing steps, 
are a kind of personal insult and contumely to the 
owner ; and long stilts, again, put him at perpetual 
disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general 
level of mankind. Martial ridicules a gentleman of 
his day whose countenance resembled the face of 
a swimmer seen under water. Saadi describes a 
schoolmaster " so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of 
him would derange the ecstasies of the orthodox." 
Faces are rarely true to any ideal type, but are a 
record in sculpture of a thousand anecdotes of whim 
and folly. Portrait painters say that most faces and 
forms are irregular and unsymmetrical ; have one 
eye blue, and one gray ; the nose not straight ; and 
one shoulder higher than another ; the hair un- 
equally distributed, &c. The man is physically, as 
well as metaphysically, a thing of shreds and patches, 
borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, 
and a misfit from the start. 

A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was 
thought to betray by this sign some secret favour 
of the immortal gods : and we can pardon pride, 
when a woman possesses such a figure, that wher- 
ever she stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the 
wall, or sits for a portrait to the artist, she confers 
a favour on the world. And yet — it is not beauty 
that inspires the deepest passion. Beauty without 
grace is the hook without the bait. Beauty, with- 
out expression, tires. Abbe Menage said of the 
President Le Bailleul, " that he was fit for nothing 
but to sit for his portrait." A Greek epigram in- 
timates that the force of love is not shown by the 
courting of beauty, but when the like desire is in- 
named for one who is ill-favoured. And petulant 
old gentlemen — who have chanced to suffer some 



BEAUTY. 187 

intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who 
have seen cut flowers to some profusion, or who see, 
after a world of pains have been successfully taken 
lor the costume, how the least mistake in sentiment 
takes all the beauty out of your clothes — affirm, that 
the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but 
in being uninteresting. 

We love any forms, however ugly, from which 
great qualities shine. If command, eloquence, art, 
or invention, exist in the most deformed person, all 
the accidents that usually displease, please, and raise 
esteem and wonder higher. The great orator was an 
emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain. 
Cardinal De Retz says of De Bouillon, " With the 
physiognomy of an ox, he had the perspicacity of an 
eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of Newton, 
" he is the most, and promises the least, of any man 
in England." " Since I am so ugly," said Du 
Guesclin, " it behoves that I be bold." Sir Philip 
Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells us, 
" was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being 
spoiled with pimples, and of high blood, and long." 
Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, 
for thousands of years, were not handsome men. If a 
man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, 
can make bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join 
oceans by canals, can subdue steam, can organize 
victory, can lead the opinions of mankind, can enlarge 
knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his nose is parallel 
to his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a 
nose at all ; whether his legs are straight, or whether 
his legs are amputated ; his deformities will come to 
be reckoned ornamental, and advantageous on the 
whole. This is the triumph of expression, ^degrading 
beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly 
and intoxicating, that it makes admired persons in- 
sipid, and the thought of passing our lives with them 
insupportable. There are faces so fluid with expres- 



188 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

sion, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought, 
that we can hardly find what the mere features really 
are. When the delicious beauty of lineaments loses 
its power, it is because a more delicious beauty has 
appeared ; that an interior and durable form has been 
disclosed. Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before. 
Still, " it was for beauty that the world was made." 
The lives of the Italian artists, who established a 
despotism of genius amidst the dukes and kings and 
mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in 
all times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than 
their own. If a man can cut such a head on his 
stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a crowd about 
it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable 
meaning ; — if a man can build a plain cottage with 
such symmetry, as to make all the fine palaces look 
cheap and vulgar ; can take such advantage of Nature, 
that all her powers serve him ; making use of 
geometry, instead of expense ; tapping a mountain 
for his water-jet ; causing the sun and moon to seem 
only the decorations of his estate; this is still the 
legitimate dominion of beauty. 

The radiance of the human form, though some- 
times astonishing, is only a burst of beauty for a few 
years or a few months, at the perfection of youth, 
and in most, rapidly declines. But we remain lovers 
of it, only transferring our interest to interior ex- 
cellence. And it is not only admirable in singular 
and salient talents, but also in the world of manners. 

But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted. 
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, 
but, until they speak to the imagination, not yet 
beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still 
escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, 
it cannot be handled. Proclus says, " it swims on 
the light of forms." It is properly not in the form, 
but in the mind. It instantly deserts possession, and 
flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my 



BEAUTY. 189 

hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? 
The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty 
forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and 
senses cannot be gratified at the same time. Words- 
worth rightly speaks of " a light that never was on 
sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied by the 
observer, and the Welsh bard warns his country- 
women, that 

— "half of their charms with Cadvvallon shall die." 

The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful 
is a certain cosmical quality, or a power to suggest 
relation to the whole world, and so lift the object out 
of a pitiful individuality. Every natural feature, — 
sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone, — has in it 
somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks 
of that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, 
and thereby is beautiful. And, in chosen men and 
women, I find somewhat in form, speech, and manners, 
which is not of their person and family, but of a 
humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we 
love them as the sky. They have a largeness of 
suggestion, and their face and manners carry a certain 
grandeur, like time and justice. 

The feat of the imagination is in showing the 
convertibility of every thing into every other thing. 
Facts which had never before left their stark common 
sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian mysteries. My 
boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, 
meteors and constellations. All the facts in Nature 
are nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of 
the eternal language. Every word has a double, 
treble, or centuple use and meaning. What! has 
my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom ! I cry you 
mercy, good shoebox ! I did not know you were a 
jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are 
clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy 
in perceiving the representative or symbolic character 



190 CONDUCT OF LIFE. - 

of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever give. 
There are n© days in life so memorable as those 
which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination. 

The poets are quite right in decking their mis- 
tresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower- 
gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and 
stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and 
whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and 
sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. 
Into every beautiful object, there enters somewhat 
immeasurable and divine, and just as much into form 
bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, 
as into tones of music, or depths of space. Polarized 
light showed the secret architecture of bodies ; and 
when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one 
colour or form or gesture, and now another, has a 
pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, 
disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things. 

The laws of this translation we do not know, or i 
why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word 
or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that 
the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners, or a 
phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders ; as if 
the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains 
of obstruction, and deigns to draw a truer line, which 
the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty 
force of beauty, "vis superba formce" which the poets 
praise, — under calm and precise outline, the immea- 
surable and divine : Beauty hiding all wisdom and 
power in its calm sky. 

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I 
find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Anto- 
ninus : and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth 
of thought. Gross and obscure natures, however de- 
corated, seem impure shambles : but character gives 
splendour to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and grey 
hairs. An adorer of truth, we cannot choose but obey, 
and the woman who has shared with us the moral 



BEAUTY. 191 

sentiment, — her locks must appear to us sublime. 
Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the 
first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a 
scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines 
and details of the landscape, features of the human 
face and form, signs and tokens of thought and cha- 
racter in manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the 
intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps 
tend : an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trap- 
pings, up to the perception of Newton, that the globe 
on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from 
a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that 
globe and universe are rude and early expressions of 
an all- dissolving Unity, — the first stair on the scale to 
the temple of the Mind. 



XX.-ILLUSIOFS. 

Flow, flow the waves hated, 
Accursed, adored, 
The waves of mutation: 
No anchorage is. 
Sleep is not, death is not; 
Who seem to die live. 
House you were born in, 
Friends of your spring-time, 
Old man and young maid, 
Day's toil and its guerdon, 
They are all vanishing, 
Fleeing to fables, 
Cannot be moored. 
See the stars through them, 
Through treacherous marbles. 
Know, the stars yonder, 
The stars everlasting, 
Are fugitive also, 
And emulate, vaulted, 
The lambent heat-lightning. 
And fire-fly's flight. 

When thou dost return 
On the wave's circulation, 



192 CONDUCT. OF LIFE. 

Beholding the shimmer, 
The wild dissipation, 
And, out of endeavour 
To change and to flow, 
The gas become solid, 
And phantoms and nothings 
Eeturn to be things, 
And endless imbroglio 
Is law and the world. — 
Then first shalt thou know, 
That in the wild turmoil, 
Horsed on the Proteus, 
Thou ridest to power, 
And to endurance. 

Some years ago, in company with an agreeable party, 
I spent a long summer clay in exploring the Mam- 
moth Cave in Kentucky. We traversed, through 
spacious galleries affording a solid masonry founda- 
tion for the town and county overhead, the six or 
eight black miles from the mouth of the cavern to 
the innermost recess which tourists visit — a niche 
or grotto made of one seamless stalactite, and called, 
I believe, Serena's Bower. I lost the light of one 
day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits ; heard 
the voice of unseen waterfalls ; paddled three-quarters 
of a mile in the deep Echo River, whose waters are 
peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams 
"Lethe" and "Styx.;" plied with music and guns 
the echoes in these alarming galleries ; saw every 
form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and 
fretted chambers — icicle, orangeflower, acanthu? 
grapes and snowball. We shot Bengal lights in, 
the vaults and groins of the sparry cathedrals, and 
examined all the master -pieces which the four com- 
bined engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and 
time, could make in the dark. 

The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the 
same dignity that belongs to all natural objects, 
and which shames the fine things to which we 
foppishly compare them. I remarked especially the 
mimetic habit, with which Nature, on new instru- 



ILLUSIONS. 193 

ruents, hums her old tunes, making night to mimic 
day, and chemistry to ape vegetation. But I then 
took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best 
thing which the caye had to offer was an illusion. 
On arriving at what is called the " Star Chamber," 
our lamps were taken from us by the guide, and 
extinguished or put aside, and on looking upwards 
I saw, or seemed to see, the night heaven thick with 
stars glimmering more or less brightly over our 
heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming among 
them. All the party were touched with astonishment 
and pleasure. Our musical friends sung with much 
feeling a pretty song, " The stars are in the quiet 
sky," &c, and I sat down on the rocky floor to enjoy 
the serene picture. Some crystal specks in the black 
ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half- 
hid lamp, yielded this magnificent effect. 

I own I did not like the cave so well for eking 
out its sublimities with this theatrical trick. But I 
have had many experiences like it before and since ; 
and we must be content to be pleased without too 
curiously analyzing the occasions. Our conversation 
with Nature is not just what it seems. The cloud- 
rack, the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and 
northern lights are not quite so spheral as our child- 
hood thought them; and the part our organization 
plays in them is too large. The senses interfere 
everywhere, and mix their own structure with all 
they report of. Once we fancied the earth a plane, 
and stationary. In admiring the sunset we do not 
yet deduct the rounding, co-ordinating, pictorial 
powers of the eye. 

The same interference from our organization creates 
the most of our pleasure and pain. Our first mistake 
is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which 
we give to the circumstance. Life is an ecstasy. Life 
is sweet as nitrous oxide ; and the fisherman dripping 
all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the rait- 

13 



194 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

way intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro 
in the rice-swamp, the fop in the street, the hunter 
in the woods, the barrister with the jury, the belle 
at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to their 
employment, which they themselves give it. Health 
and appetite impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, 
and meat. We fancy that our civilization has got on 
far, but we still come back to our primers. 

We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, 
by our sentiments. The child walks amid heaps of 
illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed. 
The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy ! how dear 
the story of barons and battles ! What a hero he 
is, whilst he feeds on his heroes ! What a debt is 
his to imaginative books! He has no better friend 
or influence than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch, and 
Homer. The man lives to other objects, but who 
dare affirm that they are more real? Even the 
prose of the streets is full of refractions. In the 
life of the dreariest alderman, fancy enters into all 
details, and colours them with rosy hue. He imi- 
tates the air and actions of people whom he admires, 
and is raised in his own eyes. He pays a debt 
quicker to a rich man than to a poor man. He 
wishes the bow and compliment of some leader in 
the state or in society; weighs what he says; perhaps 
he never comes nearer to him for that, but dies at 
last better contented for this amusement of his eyes 
and his fancy. 

The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. 
In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, 
the carnival, the masquerade is at its height. Nobody 
drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the 
piece it would be an impertinence to break. The 
chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint ; 
nay, God is the painter ; and we rightly accuse the 
critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does 
not love its unmaskers. It was wittily, if somewhat 



ILLUSIONS. 195 

bitterly, said by D'Alembert, " quhin etat de vapeur 
dtait un Stat tres facheux, par cequHl nous f await voir les 
choses commie elles sonV I find men victims of illusion 
in all parts of life. Children, youths, adults, and 
old men, all are led by one bawble or another. 
Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or 
Momus, or Gylfi's Mocking, — for the Power has 
many names, — is stronger than the Titans, stronger 
than Apollo. Few have overheard the gods, or sur- 
prised their secret. Life is a succession of lessons 
which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, 
and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are 
as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. 
We wake from one dream into another dream. The 
toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in 
refinement to the quality of the dupe. The intel- 
lectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily 
amused. But everybody is drugged with his own 
frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with 
music and banner and badge. 

Amid the joyous troop who give in to the chari- 
vari, comes now and then a sad-eyed boy, whose 
eyes lack the requisite refractions to clothe the show 
in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency 
to trace home the glittering miscellany of fruits 
and flowers to one root. Science is a search after 
identity, and the scientific whim is lurking in all 
corners. At the State Fair, a friend of mine com- 
plained that all the varieties of fancy pears in our 
orchards seem to have been selected by somebody 
who had a whim for a particular kind of pear, and 
only cultivated such as had that perfume ; they were 
all alike. And I remember the quarrel of another 
youth with the confectioners, that, when he racked 
his wit to choose the best comfits in the shops, in all 
the endless varieties of sweetmeat he could only 
find three flavours, or two. What then? Pears 
and cakes are good for something ; and because you, 

13—2 



196 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

unluckily, have an eye or nose too keen, why need 
you spoil the comfort which the rest of us find in 
them ? I knew a humorist, who, in a good deal 
of rattle, had a grain or two of sense. He shocked 
the company by maintaining that the attributes of 
God were two, — power and risibility; and that it 
was the duty of every pious man to keep up the 
comedy. And I have known gentlemen of great 
stake in the community, but whose sympathies were 
cold, — presidents of colleges, and governors, and 
senators, — who held themselves bound to sign every 
temperance pledge, and act with Bible societies, and 
missions, and peace-makers, and cry Hist-a-boy ! to 
every good dog. We must not carry comity too 
far, but we all have kind impulses in this direction. 
When the boys come into my yard for leave to 
gather horse-chesnuts, I own I enter into Nature's 
game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, 
fearing that any moment they will find out the im- 
posture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is 
quite unnecessary ; the enchantments are laid on 
very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. 
Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in 
the hovel I saw yesterday ; yet not the less they 
hung it round with frippery romance, like the chil- 
dren of the happiest fortune, and talked of " the 
dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown." 
Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the 
country. Women, more than all, are the element and 
kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate. 
They see through Claude-Lorraines. And how dare 
any one, if he could, pluck away the coulisses, stage 
effects, and ceremonies, by which they live? Too 
pathetic, too pitiable, is the region of affection, and 
its atmosphere always liable to mirage. 

We are not very much to blame for our bad 
marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and this 
especial trap is laid to trip up our feet with, and all 



ILLUSIONS. 197 

are tripped up first or last. But the mighty Mother 
who had been so sly with us, as if she felt that she 
owed us some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora- 
box of marriage some deep and serious benefits, and 
some great joys. We find a delight in the beauty 
and happiness of children, that makes the heart too 
big for the body. In the worst assorted connections 
there is ever some mixture of true marriage. Teague 
and his jade get some just relations of mutual respect, 
kindly observation, and fostering of each other, learn 
something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if 
they were now to begin. 

'Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine 
madman, as if there were any exempts. The scholar 
in his library is none. I, who have all my life heard 
any number of orations and debates, read poems and 
miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, 
am still the victim of any new page ; and, if Marma- 
duke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or any other, invent 
a new style or mythology, I fancy that the world 
will be all brave and right, if dressed in these colours, 
which I had not thought of. Then at once I will 
daub with this new paint ; but it will not stick. 'Tis 
like the cement which the peddler sells at the door ; 
he makes broken crockery hold with it, but you can 
never buy of him a bit of the cement which will 
make it hold when he is gone. 

Men who make themselves felt in the world avail 
themselves of a certain fate in their constitution, 
which they know how to use. But they never deeply 
interest us, unless they lift a corner of the curtain, 
or betray never so slightly their penetration of what 
is behind it. 'Tis the charm of practical men, that 
outside of their practicality are a certain poetry and 
play, as if they led the good horse Power by the 
bridle, and preferred to walk, though they can ride 
so fiercely. Bonaparte is intellectual, as well as 
Cassar ; and the best soldiers, sea-captains, and rail- 



198 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

way men have a gentleness, when off duty ; a good- 
natured admission that there are illusions, and who 
shall say that he is not their sport ? We stigmatize 
the cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach them- 
selves, as "dragon-ridden," " thunder-stricken," and 
fools of fate, with whatever powers endowed. 

Since our tuition is through emblems and indi- 
rections, 'tis well to know that there is method in it, 
a fixed scale, and rank above rank in the phantasms. 
We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the 
most subtle and beautiful. The red men told 
Columbus, " they had an herb which took away 
fatigue ; " but he found the illusion of u arriving 
from the east at the Indies " more composing to his 
lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our faith in the 
impenetrability of matter more sedative than nar- 
cotics ? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, 
horse and gun, estates and politics ; but there are 
finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy ? 
Life will show you masks that are worth all your 
carnivals. Yonder mountain must migrate into your 
mind. The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in 
Orion, " the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," 
must come down and be dealt with in your house- 
hold thought. What if you shall come to discern 
that the play and playground of all this pompous 
history are radiations from yourself, and that the sun 
borrows his beams ? What terrible questions we are 
learning to ask ! The former men believed in magic, 
by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed 
up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on 
the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds 
all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their 
fathers held and were framed upon. 

There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of 
the passions, and the structural, beneficent illusions 
of sentiment and of the intellect. There is the illu- 
sion of love, which attributes to the beloved person 



ILLUSIONS. 199 

all which that person shares with his or her family, 
sex, age, or condition, nay, with the human mind 
itself. 'Tis these which the lover loves, and Anna 
Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up 
always in a tower, with one window, through which 
the face of heaven and earth could be seen, should 
fancy that all the marvels he beheld belonged to that 
window. There is the illusion of time, which is very 
deep ; who has disposed of it? or come to the con- 
viction that what seems the succession of thought is 
only the distribution of wholes into casual series? 
The intellect sees that every atom carries the whole 
of Nature; that the mind opens to omnipotence; 
that, in the endless striving and ascents, the meta- 
morphosis is entire, so that the soul doth not know 
itself in its own act, when that act is perfected. 
There is illusion that shall deceive even the elect. 
There is illusion that shall deceive even the performer 
of the miracle. Though he make his body, he denies 
that he makes it. Though the world exists from 
thought, thought is daunted in presence of the world. 
One after the other we accept the mental laws, still 
resisting those which follow, which, however, must 
be accepted. But all our concessions only compel 
us to new profusion. And what avails it that science 
has come to treat space and time as simply forms of 
thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and 
withal our pretension of property and even of self- 
hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our 
thoughts are not finalities ; but the incessant flowing 
and ascension reach these also, and each thought 
which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to 
a larger generalization ? 

With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no 
wonder if our estimates are loose and floating. We 
must work and affirm, but we have no guess of the 
value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as 
Ibig as your hand, and now it covers a county. That 



200 CONDUCT OF LITE. 

story of Thor, who was set to drain the drinking-horn 
in Asgard, and to wrestle with the old woman, and to 
run with the runner Lok, and presently found that he 
had been drinking up the sea, and wrestling with 
Time, and racing with Thought, describes us who 
are contending, amid these seeming trifles, with the 
supreme energies of Nature. We fancy we have 
fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low 
debts, shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, 
butcher's meat, sugar, milk, and coal. " Set me some 
great task, ye gods ! and I will show my spirit." "Not 
so," says the good Heaven ; " plod and plough, vamp 
your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring ; great 
affairs and the best wine by and by!" Well, 'tis all 
phantasm; and if we weave a yard of tape in all 
humility, and as well as we can, long hereafter we 
shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy 
which we braided, and that the threads were Time 
and Nature. 

We cannot write the order of the variable winds. 
How can we penetrate the law of our shifting moods 
and susceptibility? Yet they differ as all and no- 
thing. Instead of the firmament of yesterday, which 
our eyes require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops 
us in ; we cannot even see what or where our stars of 
destiny are. From day to day, the capital facts of 
human life are hidden from our eyes. Suddenly the 
mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how 
much good time is gone, that might have been saved, 
had any hint of these things been shown. A sudden 
rise in the road shows us the system of mountains, 
and all the summits, which have been just as near us 
all the year, but quite out of mind. But these alter- 
nations are not without their order, and we are parties 
to our various fortune. If life seem a succession of 
dreams, yet poetic justice is done in dreams also. 
The visions of good men are good ; it is the undis- 
ciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and 



ILLUSIONS. 201 

bad fortunes. When we break the laws, we lose our 
hold on the central reality. Like sick men in hospi- 
tals, we change only from bed to bed, from one folly 
to another ; and it cannot signify much what becomes 
of such castaways, — wailing, stupid, comatose crea- 
tures, — lifted from bed to bed, from the nothing of 
life to the nothing of death. 

In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for 
stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and 
faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of 
all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are 
played with us, we must play no games with our- 
selves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty 
and truth. I look upon the simple and childish vir- 
tues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is 
sublime in character. Speak as you think, be what 
you are, pay your debts of all kinds. I prefer to be 
owned as sound and solvent, and my word as good as 
my bond, and to be what cannot be skipped, or dissi- 
pated, or undermined, to all the eclat in the universe. 
This reality is the foundation of friendship, religion, 
poetry, and art. At the top or at the bottom of all 
illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work 
and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction, in 
all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails 
with friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune. 

One would think from the talk of men, that riches 
and poverty were a great matter ; and our civilization 
mainly respects it. But the Indians say, that they 
do not think the white man with his brow of care, 
always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping 
within doors, has any advantage of them. The per- 
manent interest of every man is, never to be in a 
false position, but to have the weight of Nature to 
back him in all that he does. Riches and poverty 
are a thick or thin costume ; and our life — the life of 
all of us — identical. For we transcend the circum- 
stance continually, and taste the real quality of exis- 



202 CONDUCT OF LIFE. 

tence ; as in our employments, which only differ in 
the manipulations, but express the same laws ; or in 
our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice- 
creams. We see God face to face every hour, and 
know the savour of Nature. 

The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and 
Xenophanes measured their force on this problem of 
identity. Diogenes of Apollonia said, that unless the 
atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend 
and act with one another. But the Hindoos, in their 
sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of 
the essential identity, and of that illusion which they 
conceive variety to be. " The notions, e I am/ and 
s Tliis is mine/ which influence mankind, are but 
delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O 
Lord of all creatures ! the conceit of knowledge 
which proceeds from ignorance." And the beatitude 
of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination. 

The intellect is stimulated by the statement of 
truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of 
life in illusions. But the unities of Truth and of 
Right are not broken by the disguise. There need 
never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life 
of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, 
or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the 
same elements offer the same choices to each new- 
comer, and, according to his election, he fixes his 
fortune in absolute Nature. It would be hard to put 
more mental and moral philosophy than the Persians 
have thrown into a sentence: — . 

" Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise : 
Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice." 

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the uni- 
verse. All is system and gradation. Every god is 
there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters 
the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with 
them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and 
gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the 






ILLUSIONS. 203 

instant^ and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. 
He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this 
way and that, and whose movement and doings he 
must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, in- 
significant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, 
now furiously commanding this thing to be done, 
now that. What is he that he should resist their 
will, and think or act for himself? Every moment, 
new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to baffle 
and distract him. And when, by and by, for an 
instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there 
are the gods still sitting around him on their 
thrones, — they alone with him alone. 



THE END. 



London : 

Trinted bt Smith, Elder and Co., 

Little Gheen Arbour Court, Old Bailey, E.C. 




^: 



THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEIGH HUNT. 



A NEW EDITION. 



Revised by the Author. With Further Eevision, and> 

an Introduction, by his Eldest Son. 

Small post 8vo. 2s. 6d. cloth. 



[British Quarterly Review.] 
" It is not often that a man is at his best when he writes about himself, 
hut it is so with the author of this volume. He wrote many things that 
were pleasant to read, but nothing so pleasant as this account of his ex- 
periences and friendships as the London Man of Letters." 

[Morning Herald.] 

" The volume abounds with pleasant reading, and will be found 
to contain information to be acquired from no other source. The per- 
sonal characteristics of the leading literary men of the past generation 
are fully detailed, and are in some degree invaluable. The anecdotal 
matter contained in these pages is unique of its kind, and the volume is 
a perfect treasury of reference to Hook, Matthews the Elder, Byron, 
Shelley, and Charles Lamb, their opinions and their modes of thought, 
speech, and action." 

[Saturday Review.] 

"It is, perhaps, the first charm of an autobiography that it should 
make us like the writer, and certainly this is a chartn which the ' Auto- 
biography of Leigh Hunt ' possesses in an unusual degree." 

[Illustrated London News.] 
" In every respect it carries with it a charm which ought to make the 
book popular in the higher sense of the term." 
[Eclectic Review.] 
" A charming gossiping volume, written in Leigh Hunt's happiest 
style." 

[Globe.] 
"Few persons who are fitted to judge of the matter will hesitate to 
■assert that Leigh Hunt's ' Autobiography' is one of the very best books 
of its kind. It gives a true and vivid account of the people, and the 
events among which the writer's life was passed. Politics, art, litera- 
ture and (what is worth them all) personal character are truthfully 
shown, and cleverly, admiringly, and often affectionately commented on 
in these pages." 

[Economist.] 
"This Autobiography is certainly one of the best of Leigh Hunt's 
numerous works, and one calculated to ensure him a wider circle of 
readers and a more lasting remembrance than any other." 
[Atlas.] 
"The stoiy of a man's life told by himself is always interesting; but 
it must b,e doubly so when the teller is a man of so fine a genius, so 
richly cultivated a mind, and so beautiful a nature as Leigh Hunt." 



LONDON : SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 



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